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The Climate Change Thread - Page 6

post #251 of 268
7/12/10 at 7:01pm
Is anyone else EXTREMELY offended by all this ACORN nonsense?
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post #252 of 268
7/24/10 at 1:18am
...and that's that?

Obama climate plan in tatters after Senate drops energy bill

Quote:
US PLANS for combating climate change, including a form of carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, are in tatters after Democrats conceded they could not garner enough support for a comprehensive energy bill.

The admission delivers a potentially fatal blow to President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign promise to address a ''planet in peril'' by introducing measures to curb harmful carbon dioxide emissions.

News of the failure angered environmentalists and renewable energy advocates who argue that the US, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, must lead global efforts to fight climate change. Sizzling summer temperatures, following record winter snows, are prompting renewed discussion in the US about the issue.

But senators, wary of backing measures that would lift energy costs for consumers at a time of economic hardship and mindful of looming mid-term congressional elections, withheld their support for the energy blueprint.

With Republicans poised for windfall gains in November's mid-term elections, the prospect for any cap-and-trade scheme could be shelved for at least the next two years.
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post #253 of 268
7/24/10 at 1:45pm
Slow burning fuse?
Quote:
Pakistan’s Prime Minister held an emergency meeting this month, but failed to settle a water dispute between the country’s major provinces, Sindh and Punjab. Senior ministers from India and Pakistan have visited each other in recent weeks, trying to restart peace talks for the first time in two years, but the fledgling dialogue has been hampered by disagreement over water.
The talks have also been dogged by Pakistan’s refusal to crack down on Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a group suspected of links to terrorism. This year, the group took up the slogan “water or war,” accusing India of blocking rivers. It says the rallying cry has boosted recruitment in rural areas.
On the other hand, it's a lovely day here -- time for a quick weekend getaway in the van and onto the ferry ...
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post #254 of 268
10/24/10 at 11:32pm
David Suzuki announces that humanity is past its '59th minute'...

Quote:
According to David Suzuki last night at the Opera House, humanity is in the 59th minute, and we’re on a suicidal path of economic growth. He gives us an example from science – a test tube full of bacteria – to illustrate the non-negotiable laws of nature and how we’re breaking them.

Suzuki tells us to imagine putting one bacterial cell into a test tube full of food, which divides every minute. This is exponential growth, and it’s the path humanity is on because of our belief in unlimited economic growth. In his words:

“At time zero you have one cell; one minute you have two; two minutes you have four; three minutes you have eight; four minutes you have 16. That is exponential growth and at 60 minutes the test tube is completely full of bacteria and there is no food left, a sixty minute cycle. When is the test tube only half full? Well the answer of course is at 59 minutes; but a minute later it is filled. So at 58 minutes it is 25% full; 57 minutes 12½ % full.

At 55 minutes of the 60 minute cycle it is only 3% full. So, if at 55 minutes one of the bacteria said to its companions that they had a population problem, the other bacteria would be incredulous because 97% of the test tube would be empty and they had been around for 55 minutes. Yet they would have only 5 minutes left. How do we add even a fraction of 1% more of air, water, soil or biodiversity? We cannot. The biosphere is fixed and finite and every biologist I have talked to agrees with me, we are past the 59th minute.”

His example is no more than an illustration of the common sense rule that you can’t have exponential growth in a planet with finite natural limits; but the way he puts it sends a jolt of recognition and realization through those sitting around me. And when he drives his point home – “I say it without apology. We are promulgating an illusion that everything is alright by using up the rightful legacy of our children and grandchildren. That is not sustainable, it is suicidal” – I imagine there’s not a person in the room, including myself, compelled to double their efforts towards changing the trajectory we’re on.
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post #255 of 268
11/9/10 at 6:58pm
Oh. My. God.
Quote:
Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), who will seek the Energy and Commerce Committee chairmanship maintains that we do not have to worry about climate change because God promised in the Bible not to destroy the world again after Noah’s flood.
Video.
And you want to run a country with these clowns? Thank you, but I think I´ll stick with China in the future.
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post #256 of 268
11/10/10 at 3:51am
The fuck? "Video removed as a violation of YouTube's policy against spam, scams, and commercially deceptive content." Really? C-SPAN footage is 'spam, scams, and commercially deceptive content?' I wonder how many Tea Partiers got together to report this video to try and cover it up.
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post #257 of 268
12/8/11 at 7:18pm

Because this thread deserves a comeback...

 

 

Chaos in Scotland as wild winds create havoc

December 9, 2011 - 9:43AM

Click to play video

Wild winds and waves batter Scotland

Schools and transport shut down across parts of the UK as stormy weather hits, with more wind and blizzard conditions expected ahead.

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Severe winds in Scotland have blown trucks off the road, toppled cement walls, brought down trees and forced a wind turbine to spin so quickly it burst into flames, with extreme weather also causing flooding and cutting power.

The winds have caused transport snarls and left thousands without power as gusts in some areas surpassed 160km/h.

The Met Office has issued a red alert, its most serious warning, and hundreds of schools have shut, the BBC reported.

Advertisement: Story continues below

On fire ... strong winds forced this turbine to spin so quickly it burst into flames.Photo: Stuart McMahon

A photo gallery on BBC Scotland's website showed two large trucks lying on their sides after being blown over at Loch Restil and a car damaged and surrounded by rubble from a collapsed wall in Aberdeen.

A 100-metre tall wind turbine at Ardrossan wind farm caught fire in the hurricane-force winds, with photographs showing bright orange embers flying through the air and thick black smoke.

Huge waves also lashed Maidens Harbour in South Ayrshire and a river in Dumfries burst its banks and flooded paddocks.

Blown over ... a lorry was turned on its side on the southbound M9 motorway near Stirling, Scotland. Photo: Reuters

The Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland said a wide area of the country would be affected and that "people could be putting themselves at considerable risk" by travelling in such weather conditions.

Glasgow Airport said 37 flights were cancelled, while Edinburgh Airport said 21 were cancelled and three diverted.

The wind made operations "extremely challenging", Edinburgh Airport said on its website.

Large seas ... waves crash against the promenade in Largs. Photo: Reuters

Train schedules were also disrupted.

Scottish Hydro said "thousands" of customers were without power, mostly in the west of Scotland. It said it expected the situation to "develop throughout the day" as the storm moved east.

The severe weather also hit parts of northern England, with Cumbria experiencing heavy rain and widespread localised flooding.

Wild winds ... a walks next to the promenade in Largs. Photo: Reuters

AP and smh.com.au



Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/environment/weather/chaos-in-scotland-as-wild-winds-create-havoc-20111209-1om1w.html#ixzz1g0IfsmdS

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post #258 of 268
12/8/11 at 7:41pm

Well there's egg on your face:

 

University of California-Berkeley physicist Richard Muller is notorious for believing that conventional wisdom is often wrong. For example, the conventional wisdom about climate change. Muller has criticized Al Gore in the past as an "exaggerator," has spoken warmly of climate skeptic Anthony Watts, and has said that Steve McIntyre's famous takedown of the "hockey stick" climate graph made him "uncomfortable" with the paper the hockey stick was originally based on.

 

So in 2010 he started up the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST) to show the world how to do climate analysis right. Who better, after all? "Muller's views on climate have made him a darling of skeptics," said Scientific American, "and newly elected Republicans in the House of Representatives, who invited him to testify to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology about his preliminary results." The Koch Foundation, founded by the billionaire oil brothers who have been major funders of the climate-denial machine, gave BEST a $150,000 grant.

 

But Muller's congressional testimony last March didn't go according to plan. He told them a preliminary analysis suggested that the three main climate models in use today—each of which uses a different estimating technique, and each of which has potential flaws—are all pretty accurate

 

In the press release announcing the results, Muller said, "Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK." In other words, climate scientists know what they're doing after all.

 

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post #259 of 268
12/8/11 at 7:44pm

I wonder if the Cock Bros. demanded their $150,000 back?

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post #260 of 268
12/8/11 at 8:35pm

What does everyone think of using geoengineering to combat climate change?

 

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Geoengineering


Edited by Barry Woodward - 12/8/11 at 9:04pm
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post #261 of 268
12/8/11 at 9:17pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Barry Woodward View Post

What does everyone think of using geoengineering to combat climate change?

 

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Geoengineering



Basically that it's the first reel of an end-of-the-world disaster flick. 

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post #262 of 268
12/19/11 at 5:17pm

1,000 dead in Philippine storm. 

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/20/us-philippines-typhoon-idUSTRE7BI05J20111220

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post #263 of 268
12/19/11 at 6:56pm

I had a minor heart attack when I first read that news, because I sponsor a kid in the Philippines. He lives in Manila, though, so he's alright (comparatively speaking).

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post #264 of 268
12/19/11 at 9:12pm

I'm glad he's okay.  It's so terrible.  This is what's happening around the world while we're listening to these lunatics talk about who hates the gays or the 'legals more.  I was in Thailand last year and was horrified to see the footage of the floods -- especially all of the animals that were trapped.  These are the images that should go through everyone's mind when any sellout to oil and coal denies global warming. 

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post #265 of 268
12/30/11 at 4:34pm

 

Quote:

The year 2011 brought the most billion-dollar climate disasters to the United States ever, piling history-making events on top of each other to catastrophic results. The litany of disaster included a scorching drought that rivaled the Dust Bowl summer of 1936, a tornado season twice as bad as the great 1974 tornado outbreak, and flooding worse than the the great 1927 flood on the Mississippi River. This year of disaster was the result of the unlimited burning of fossil fuels, which has trapped increasing amounts of heat in the atmosphere, disrupting our climate system.

 

In an interview with PBS News Hour, Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters described the effect of the hundreds of billions of tons of global warming pollution as being like “steroids for the atmosphere,” intensifying extreme weather to unprecedented results:

 

We look at heat waves, droughts, and flooding events. They all tend to get increased when you have this extra energy in the atmosphere. I call it being on steroids for the atmosphere. Normally, you have the everyday ups and downs of the weather, but if you pack a little bit of extra punch in there, it’s like a baseball hitter who’s on steroids. You expect to see a big home run total maybe from this slugger, but if you add a little bit of extra oomph to his swing by putting him on steroids, now we can have an unprecedented season, a 70 home run season. And that’s the way I look at this year. We had an unprecedented weather year that I don’t think would have happened unless we had had an extra bit of energy in the atmosphere due to climate change and global warming.

 

 

Nationwide, more than 6,000 heat records were broken this year. On average, the U.S. has three or four events every year that are considered major natural disasters. But, this year, there were at least fourteen billion-dollar disasters. Damages are expected to exceed $53 billion.

 

 

I consider the $53 billion-dollar figure the costs we absorb on behalf of the big oil and coal companies.  They don't have to pay for these externalities; we do.  It's sickness.  And the cost in dollars is nothing compared to the cost in lives.  I hate to sound overdramatic but we're seriously subsidizing our own and our planet's destruction.  It's sickness.

 

Watch the grim and alarming PBS story here:  http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/environment/july-dec11/weather_12-28.html

 

 

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post #266 of 268
1/2/12 at 4:21pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by yt View Post

1,000 dead in Philippine storm. 

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/20/us-philippines-typhoon-idUSTRE7BI05J20111220



This time last year I was leaving the Philippines after two of the best weeks of my life.

 

On a plane for another two of the best weeks ever in Thailand, another country ravaged this year.

 

Fuck.

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post #267 of 268
3/11/12 at 12:55pm

I was thinking of posting this in the 2012 Elections thread but then I remembered this thread....

 

I realize that there is not supposed to be a 'religious test' for government service but I am starting to think that maybe we need one...

 

"Do you consider yourself very religious and think that your religious book(s) are the actual word(s) or your god(s) and are completely infallible?

...if you answered YES to this question, I'm sorry but you are no longer eligible for work in the US Government. Have a SUPER day, there's the door...goodbye.

 

Quote:

 

God versus James Inhofe

 

Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, seen here discussing Bible citations in his new book on the "hoax" of climate change science:

 

Inhofe: Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use [in the book] is that ‘as long as the earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night,’ my point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous. [...]

I would say that the other Scripture that I use quite frequently on this subject is Romans 1:25, ‘They give up the truth about God for a lie and they worship God’s creation instead of God, who will be praised forever.’ In other words, they are trying to say we should worship the creation. We were reminded back in Romans that this was going to happen and sure enough it’s happening.

 

Of all of the arguments made against the science of climate change, I find the ones based on Biblical assertion to be the most ... malevolent. There are people who believe that all of climate change science is one vast conspiracy, a theory constructed around the premise that scientists or politicians have somehow plotted out a secret financial stake in making people believe the planet is getting warmer. There are those that acknowledge it is getting warmer, but refuse to agree that human activity could possibly be playing a role. Then there are those that simply state that God would not allow any of it to happen, so there. Inhofe himself I believe falls into all three camps. I have no idea if he honestly believes these things or just has decided, cart before horse, that his politics demand he believe them. It is the Bible-thumping that bothers me the most, though. The shallowness, the dismissive assertion of knowing God's will, the misuse of passages to mean things very far afield indeed from the actual text.

<cont.>

 

 

 

 

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post #268 of 268
3/26/12 at 11:47am

I didn't know where else to put this, but it's pretty incredible:  Brazil is treating an oil spill--appropriately--as a crime against the environment.  Quite a contrast from what oil companies have been able to accomplish with lobbying, campaign spending and revolving door cronyism in the US. 

 

Quote:

Chevron executives barred from leaving Brazil over spill

By Guillermo Parra-Bernal and Jeb Blount

 

SAO PAULO/RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - A Brazilian court on Saturday barred 17 executives from Chevron (NYS:CVX - News) and Transocean (VTX:RIGN.VX - News) from leaving Brazil, pending criminal charges related to a high-profile oil spill last November.

A federal judge in Rio de Janeiro state granted a request from prosecutors who are pressing for charges against both firms, a spokesman for prosecutor Eduardo Oliveira said in a phone interview. George Buck, who heads Chevron's Brazil unit, and the other 16 executives must turn in their passports to the police within 24 hours, the spokesman said.

 

Charges are expected to be filed on Tuesday or Wednesday, according to the prosecutors' press office.

 

The court decision came a day after the Brazilian navy spotted a thin stain of oil extending for about 0.6 mile in offshore field Frade, which was also the site of last year's spill. U.S.-based Chevron said in a statement it halted production at Frade on Saturday after winning permission from Brazilian oil industry regulator ANP.

Neither Chevron nor any of its executives "have been formally notified of any action by the judiciary yet," the company statement said. "Any legal decision will be abided by the company and its employees. We will defend the company and its employees."

 

Prosecutors want to press a criminal indictment of Buck and other executives from Chevron and Swiss-based offshore drilling company Transocean, three government sources told Reuters in January. Transocean's rig was used in the Frade field.

 

It is up to a judge to determine whether to accept the charges and proceed with indictments.

 

Chevron's spill in November leaked as many as 3,000 barrels from sea-floor cracks. It resulted in an $11 billion civil lawsuit, the largest environmental damages case in Brazil's history, although the total amount of oil was less than 0.1 percent of the BP spill in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico.

Chevron's troubles in Brazil could force it to rethink Latin American strategies. A shortage of trained workers, engineers and equipment has driven up costs in Brazil, and Chevron faces an $18 billion environmental verdict in Ecuador.

 

Chevron is stopping production plans to better assess its "reservoir management plans" in Brazil, where it has spent over $2 billion developing the largest foreign-run oil field. The suspension will shut down a field with the capacity to produce 80,000 barrels a day, more than 3 percent of Brazil's oil output.

Chevron, which made public on Thursday the request to suspend output at Frade, said the plan was supported by its partners in the field: Brazilian state oil company Petrobras (SAO:PETR4.SA - News) and Frade Japan, which is owned by Japan's Inpex (TYO:1605), Japanese trading house Sojitz (TYO:2768) and Japanese state oil and metals group JOGMEC.

 

Chevron owns 52 percent of Frade and operates the field. Petrobras owns 30 percent and Frade Japan, 18 percent.

"The decision to request the temporary shut-in of production is a precautionary measure," Chevron said in the statement. "The company will conduct a comprehensive technical study and prepare a complementary study to better understand the geological features of the area, working with partners."

 

NAVY SPOTS STAINS

Navy staff found the stain on Friday after flying over the area off Brazil's Atlantic coast, according to a statement late on Friday. 

 The navy, the ANP and environmental protection agency Ibama will monitor and coordinate actions with Chevron to control the stain, the statement added.

 

Most of the oil coming from the leak is being captured by specially built containment devices, Chevron said, adding additional devices would be installed as needed.

 

Chevron said on Thursday there was no evidence that the new leak and the one in November were related.

Natural oil leaks in the Campos Basin, home to the Frade field, are common, Cleveland Jones, a geologist at UFRJ, the state university of Rio de Janeiro, said in an interview.

 

"Until there is some proof, there is a good chance that this leak is a natural occurrence, not something to do with Chevron," he said. "Leaks of this size are common, and are how people realized there was oil in the area in the first place."'

 

ANP, Brazil's navy and Ibama officials will meet early next week to assess the situation.

 

(Additional reporting by Maria Pia Palermo in Rio de Janeiro; Editing by Peter Cooney)

 

 

From Reuters/Yahoo

 

Dead silence on this in the media, including NPR.  Luckily, Thom Hartmann mentioned it on his radio show on Friday. 

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