How Bad Is Global Warming?

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Luther Blissett » Mon Mar 09, 2015 9:30 am

I highly recommend the video in the Guardian link above of an excerpt from Naomi Klein's forthcoming "This Changes Everything" documentary. Some of the footage of the Alberta tar sands is like nothing I've seen before.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Mon Mar 09, 2015 12:57 pm

Thanks, Luther. I remember the interview. Videos available at links.

Democracy Now September 14, 2014: Capitalism vs. the Climate: Naomi Klein on Need for New Economic Model to Address Ecological Crisis

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/9/18/capitalism_vs_the_climate_naomi_klein

"This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate." Excerpt:
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/9/17/thursday_naomi_klein_on_her_new_book

http://www.democracynow.org/images/blog_posts/72/25072/splash/This-Changes-Everything-v2.jpg?201502271457

On why the Keystone Pipeline must not be built:
2014-11-17
Naomi Klein: Reject Keystone XL Pipeline, We Need Radical Change to Prevent Catastrophic Warming

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/17/naomi_klein_reject_keystone_xl_pipeline
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby norton ash » Mon Mar 09, 2015 1:46 pm

Fucking BOOM. Another one just went up in Gogama, Ontario, luckily away from humans. Dirty cruddy oil =rolling bombs.

http://stories.weather.com/boom
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby norton ash » Mon Mar 09, 2015 2:06 pm

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/g ... -1.2986150

This is appalling. What didn't burn just poisoned an entire watershed.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Luther Blissett » Mon Mar 09, 2015 2:56 pm

Looming Warming Spurt Could Reshape Climate Debate

Humanity is about to experience a historically unprecedented spike in temperatures.

That’s the ominous conclusion of a vast and growing body of research that links sweeping Pacific Ocean cycles with rates of warming at the planet’s surface — warming rates that could affect how communities and nations respond to threats posed by climate change.

Papers in two leading journals this week reaffirmed that the warming effects of a substantial chunk of our greenhouse gas pollution have been avoided on land for the last 15 to 20 years because of a phase in a decades-long cycle of ocean winds and currents. With Pacific trade winds expected to slacken in the years ahead, the studies warn that seas will begin absorbing less of global warming’s energy, and that some of the heat they’ve been holding onto will rise to the surface.

“Their results make sense to me, and are consistent with other evidence,” National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist Kevin Trenberth, who has published research dealing with the relationship between Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) phases and surface warming, but who was not involved with either of the new studies, said. “The PDO clearly plays a key role — and very high PDO values in recent months appear to signal a change.”

The growing body of research helps explain why ocean temperatures have been rising faster than anticipated, and, perhaps more compellingly, why land temperatures rose less than models had projected after the turn of the century — a mystery, sometimes dubbed the warming “hiatus,” “pause” or “faux pause,” that confounded science until just the last couple of years.

“The hiatus is associated with the negative PDO phase — with strong subtropical trade winds that pile the warm water up in the tropical western Pacific, and bury some warm water in the subtropics,” Trenberth said. “If you turn that off, then the waters warm more generally and over a shallower layer, with consequences for the atmosphere above.”

Amid the questions left unanswered by the research, however, are whether communities are prepared for looming assaults of increasingly intense heat waves after the warming slowdown reverses, and how the expected spikes in surface temperatures could affect policy debates dealing with climate action and clean energy.

"A future speedup in warming is likely to affect public opinion about climate change if it results in changes at the local level that people recognize," Utah State University assistant professor Peter Howe, who has researched public perceptions of climate change, said. "I would also caution, though, that perceptions and experiences of local climate conditions appear to be related to some extent by pre-existing beliefs about global warming."

Along with rising tides caused by rising temperatures, intense heat and heat waves are the clearest signs so far that human activity is altering the climate. A suite of modeling studies have independently concluded that heat waves that ravaged Australia in 2013 would have been almost impossible without the warming effects of our greenhouse gas pollution. Scientists have also directly linked record-breaking heat in Europe with global warming.

Meanwhile, California’s record-breaking heat last year, which some research links more closely with ocean cycles than with global warming, substantially worsened the drought-inducing effects of low rainfall and snowfall rates. That’s a problem that will continue to worsen fire risks throughout the American West, and much of the rest of the world, as temperatures start to really spike. That could threaten the survival of entire ecosystems, including the spectacular high-altitude forests of the American Southwest.

Cities and communities around the world are already taking steps to protect their citizens from the rising threats of extreme heat waves, which often take the heaviest tolls in cities, where concrete urban landscapes produce islands of intense heat. Steps taken by public health departments in places such as Milwaukee, for example, include better planning for heat emergencies, such as providing places where vulnerable residents can cool down. Steps being taken in other American cities, such as Louisville, Ky., aim to reimagine the built environment in ways that can reduce the heat island effect.

Residents of tropical countries can be even more vulnerable than those in the U.S. to the looming warming burst.

“Temperatures are rising in India,” Nehmat Kaur, a Natural Resources Defense Council official who helped develop heat action plans and early warning systems for the oppressively hot Gujarati city of Ahmedabad, said. “Cities in India are taking notice of that, and taking measures to safeguard vulnerable communities.”

But experts agree that more could be done. And a renewed urgency in boosting the resilience of cities, farms and infrastructure to the effects of extreme heat may be required as temperatures rise at a hastening pace in the coming years.

“The public health community is starting to talk a lot more about climate generally,” Georgetown University Law Center adjunct professor Sara Pollock Hoverter, who specializes in climate change and climate resilience, said. “I think that all of us need to do more.”

In one of this week’s papers, four British researchers used a suite of climate models to conclude that there’s a 25 percent probability that a 15-year warming slowdown, such as the recent one, would extend by five more years. “Therefore,” they wrote in their paper, published Monday in Nature Climate Change, “we should not be surprised if the current hiatus continues until the end of the decade.” During the five years that follows such a slowdown, they found there was a 60 percent chance that surface temperatures would leap by 0.36°F — which is double the normal background rate of warming that would be expected given current levels of greenhouse gas pollution. That could worsen heat waves, compound droughts and exacerbate other impacts of climate change.

Seperately, three American researchers used computer models to tease apart the warming roles of heat-trapping air pollution, sunlight-reflecting air pollution and other forces that affect global temperatures from the effects of natural variation caused by long-term Atlantic and Pacific ocean cycles.

“Our interpretation is it’s this low-frequency internal variation in the Pacific that’s contributing substantially to the slowdown of the last 10 or 15 years,” Penn State meteorology professor Michael Mann, one of the authors of the study, published this week in Science, said. “In our analysis, it very much looks like we’re at a turning point, so it's likely to turn around and go in the other direction in the decade ahead.”

Many climate debates have been muddied in recent years by false or confused claims that global warming stopped around 1998, in spite of the steady succession of record-breaking globally hot years — including last year’s unprecedented global temperatures.

“When it comes to this argument that global warming has somehow slowed down or stopped, that climate change isn’t a problem, this is just another piece of evidence adding to the pile of evidence that’s accumulating that this is a temporary blip,” Mann said. “We are likely to see the flip side in the decades ahead. At that point, will the same contrarians in the climate debate who argued that global warming has stopped turn around and say global warming is accelerating?”

Anthony Leiserowitz, a researcher who leads the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, said a sudden ramp-up in global warming rates could affect decisions made by policy makers. That could lead to a redoubling of the lackluster efforts so far to reduce climate pollution caused by fossil fuel burning, deforestation and agriculture, and help prompt communities to take more meaningful steps to adapt to the changes already underway.

A flip from a global warming slowdown to a warming speedup wouldn’t necessarily be enough, Leiserowitz cautions, to change the minds of people who stubbornly doubt the existence or importance of the climate crisis.

“It’s fair to say that the vast majority of the public is completely unaware of the word ‘hiatus,’ or the word ‘pause,’ or any of the arguments that have been going on for a few years now between the scientific community and the deniers,” Leiserowitz said. “The vast majority of, well, at least Americans, rarely hear about climate change in the media.”

Research by Leiserowitz and others has shown that people can link extreme weather events, such as heat waves, with climate change — but he said they often need help in understanding the relationship.

“There have been a number of studies that have shown that some people will change their views of climate change based on extreme weather,” Leiserowitz said. “It’s not enough to simply experience a heat wave — it then needs to be contextualized. It needs to be interpreted by thought leaders and trusted people in a community and by the media and scientists saying, ‘This is an indication of global warming.’”

The looming warming spike could be one of the clearest indications yet of global warming — an indicator that will coincide with the ongoing fall in the price of renewable energy. Perhaps it will also coincide with a renewed international commitment to U.N. climate talks, following decades of failures and inaction — inaction that led us to this precarious moment in the industrialized planet’s climate history.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:34 pm

Nordic » Fri Mar 06, 2015 11:09 pm wrote:I have wondered that myself. It makes me think "hey Canada, what the fuck?! Why don't you do something about this bullshit?!"

Then I realize that people all over the world must be thinking the same thing about Americans.

Hell, I think that about Americans almost 24 hours a day.

But my standards for Canadians are much higher.


Mine are too, but only because the stupidity of US politicians is astoundingly high. Case in point:

Florida Officials Were Barred From Using The Term 'Climate Change' Once Rick Scott Took Power

Posted: 03/08/2015 2:27 pm

Officials responsible for making sure Florida is prepared to respond to the earth's changing climate are barred from using the terms "global warming" and "climate change" in official communications, emails and reports, according to new findings from the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

"We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact," said Kristina Trotta, a former Florida Department of Environmental Protection employee.

Another former employee added, "We were dealing with the effects and economic impact of climate change, and yet we can't reference it."

Climate change is a major problem for Florida. Last year, the National Climate Assessment named Miami as one of the cities in the United States most vulnerable to damage from rising sea levels. A Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact paper has also warned that water in the area could rise by as much as 2 feet by the year 2060.

But the state's governor, Republican Rick Scott, has frustrated scientists by downplaying the problem.

Last year, a reporter asked Scott whether man-made climate change "is significantly affecting the weather, the climate." Scott tried to change the subject and replied, "Well, I'm not a scientist."

When asked by the Tampa Bay Times in 2010 whether he believed in climate change, Scott simply replied, "No."

In August, five climate scientists met with Scott and told him he needs to do more to protect the state from rising sea levels.

According to the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, the policy against mentioning global warming went into effect after Scott took office in 2011 and appointed Herschel Vinyard Jr. as the agency's director.

Christopher Byrd, a counsel with the state Department of Environmental Protection, said he first heard about the policy at a staff meeting in 2011.

"Deputy General Counsel Larry Morgan was giving us a briefing on what to expect with the new secretary," Byrd recalled, saying he gave them "a warning to beware of the words global warming, climate change and sea-level rise, and advised us not to use those words in particular."

"I did infer from this meeting that this was a new policy, that these words were to be prohibited for use from official DEP policy-making with our clients," he added.

The agency's press secretary told the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting that "DEP does not have a policy on this." The governor's office similarly said, "There's no policy on this."
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Mar 10, 2015 9:38 am

10 myths about fossil fuel divestment put to the sword
As environmentalist Bill McKibben lays out the case for divesting from coal, oil and gas companies, we examine some of the popular myths around fossil fuel divestment

1. Divestment from fossil fuels will result in the end of modern civilisation
It is true that most of today’s energy, and many useful things such as plastics and fertilisers, come from fossil fuels. But the divestment campaign is not arguing for an end of all fossil fuel use starting tomorrow, with everyone heading back to caves to light a campfire. Instead it is arguing that the burning of fossil fuels at increasing rates is driving global warming, which is the actual threat to modern civilisation. Despite already having at least three times more proven reserves than the world’s governments agree can be safely burned, fossil fuel companies are spending huge sums exploring for more. Looked at in that way, pulling investments from companies committed to throwing more fuel on the climate change fire makes sense.

2. We all use fossil fuels everyday, so divestment is hypocritical
Again, no-one is arguing for an overnight end of all fossil fuel use. Instead, the 350.org group which is leading the divestment campaign calls for investors to commit to selling off their coal, oil and gas investments over five years. Fossil fuel burning will continue after that too, but the point is to reverse today’s upward trend of ever more carbon emissions into a downward trend of ever less carbon emissions. Furthermore, some of those backing a “divest-invest” strategy move money into the clean energy and energy efficiency sectors which have already begun driving the transition to a low-carbon world.

3. Divestment is not meaningful action – it’s just gesture politics
The dumping of a few fossil few stocks makes no immediate difference at all to the amount of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. But this entirely misses the point of divestment, which aims to remove the legitimacy of a fossil fuel industry whose current business model will lead to “severe, widespread and irreversible” impacts on people. Divestment works by stigmatising, as pointed out in a report from Oxford University: “The outcome of the stigmatisation process poses the most far-reaching threat to fossil fuel companies. Any direct impacts pale in comparison.”

The “gesture politics” criticism also ignores the political power of the fossil fuel industry, which spent over $400m (£265m) on lobbying and political donations in 2012 in the US alone. Undercutting that lobbying makes it easier for politicians to take action and the Oxford study showed that previous divestment campaigns – against apartheid South Africa, tobacco and Darfur – were all followed by restrictive new laws.

Those comparisons also highlight the moral dimension at the heart of the divestment campaign. Another dimension is warning investors that their fossil fuel assets may lose their value, if climate change is tackled. Lastly, backing divestment does not mean giving up putting direct pressure on politicians to act or any other climate change campaign.

4. Divestment is pointless – it can’t bankrupt the coal, oil and gas companies
More organisations are divesting all the time, from Oslo city council to Stanford University to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, but the sums are indeed relatively small when compared to the huge value of the fossil fuel companies. But the aim of divestment is not to bankrupt fossil fuel companies financially but to bankrupt them morally. This undermines their influence and helps create the political space for strong carbon-cutting policies – and that could have financial consequences.

Investors are already starting to question the future value of the fossil fuel companies’ assets and, for example, it is notable that no major bank is willing to fund the massive Galilee basin coal project in Australia. This myth can also be turned on its head by considering the risk of fossil fuel companies bankrupting their investors. Many authoritative voices, such as the heads of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, and the Bank of England, Mark Carney, have warned that many fossil fuel reserves could be left worthless by action on climate change. If the retreat from fossil fuels does not happen in a gradual and planned way investors could lose trillions of dollars as the “carbon bubble” bursts.

5. Divestment means stocks will be picked up cheaply by investors who don’t care about climate change at all
To sell a stock you have to have a buyer. But the amounts being divested are too small to flood the market and cut share prices, so they won’t be going cheap. Also, the buyers of the stock are taking on the risk that the fossil fuel stocks may tank in the future, if the world’s nations fulfil their pledge to keep global warming below 2C by sharply cutting carbon emissions. If these stocks are risky, then the public and value-based institutions primarily targeted by the divestment movement should not be holding them. The argument that owning a stock gives you influence over a company leads us neatly into the next divestment myth.

6. Shareholder engagement with fossil fuel companies is the best way to drive change
This argument would have merit if there was much evidence to support it. When, for example, the Guardian asked the Wellcome Trust to give instances where engagement had produced change, it could not. And as campaigner Bill McKibben has pointed out, engagement is unlikely to persuade a company to commit to eventually putting itself out of business. In fact some market regulators, such as in the US, do not allow this kind of engagement.

The leading environmentalist Jonathon Porritt spent years engaging with fossil fuel companies only to conclude recently that such efforts were futile. Nonetheless, serious engagement could drive some change and 2015 has seen both BP and Shell having to support such shareholder resolutions. But such resolutions need specific changes and deadlines to be effective. Whatever your view, remember this is not an either/or situation. Many campaigners view divestment as the stick and engagement as the carrot, with both aiming for the same ultimate goal.

7. Divestment means investors will lose money
Many of those who have divested so far are philanthropic organisations, universities and faith groups who use their endowments to fund their good works. Selling out of fossil fuels would cut their income, say critics, as those companies have been very profitable investments over the last few decades.

The first response to this is money does not trump morality for many of these groups. But the second is that when it comes to investments, the past is no guide to the future. Coal stocks have plummeted in value in recent years, as has the oil price in recent months, meaning recently divested funds have actually avoided losses. Furthermore, a series of analyses have suggested divestment need not dent profits.

Of course, oil prices might rebound, possibly even coal prices. But such volatility is unwelcome for investors looking for steady incomes. And for long-term investors, major financial institutions including HSBC, Citi, Goldman Sachs and Standard and Poor’s have all warned of the risks posed by fossil fuel investments, particularly coal.

Perhaps the best response to this myth is that the proof of the pudding is in the eating: over 180 organisations have already asked themselves if divestment would help or hinder their missions and then gone ahead and done it. The most notable is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, founded on a famous oil fortune. Valerie Rockefeller Wayne noted that funding companies that cause the problems being tackled by their programmes is pretty dumb: “We had investments that were undermining our grants.”

8. Fossil fuels are essential to ending world poverty
Fossil fuel supporters often argue that coal, oil and gas made the modern world and is vital to improving the lives of the world’s poorest citizens. It is an emotive argument. But the most recent report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, written and reviewed by thousands of the world’s foremost experts and approved by 195 of the world’s nations, concluded the exact opposite. Climate change, driven by unchecked fossil fuel burning, “is a threat to sustainable development,” the IPCC concluded.

It warned that global warming is set to inflict severe and irreversible impacts on people and that “limiting its effects is necessary to achieve sustainable development and equity, including poverty eradication”. The IPCC went even further, stating that climate change impacts are projected “to prolong existing and create new poverty traps”.

That could not really be clearer. The challenge is to ensure poverty is ended by the large-scale deployment of clean technology, and shifting money out of fossil fuels by divesting could help that.

9. Most fossil fuels are owned by state-controlled companies, not the publicly traded companies targeted by divestment
This is true. The International Energy Agency estimates that 74% of all coal, oil and gas reserves are owned by state-controlled companies. The most straightforward response to this is that divestment is just one of many ways of trying to curb carbon emissions and that international action at state level will of course be essential. But there are reasons why divestment could help. The listed fossil fuel companies have huge influence and undermining their power could embolden politicians in leading nations to deliver ambitious international climate action.

In any case, many of the biggest state-controlled companies float some of their stock, while also contracting the publicly traded companies to help extract their reserves. Furthermore, the state-controlled reserves tend to be the ones that are easiest and cheapest to extract and are therefore the most sensible to use in filling up the last of the atmosphere’s carbon budget, the trillion tonnes or so of carbon that scientists say is the limit before dangerous climate change kicks in. Last, the extreme and expensive hydrocarbons that really must stay in the ground – such as tar sands, the Arctic and ultra deep water reserves – are the near exclusive preserve of listed companies.

10. It’s none of your business how other people invest their money
First, some divestment campaigners target their own pensions funds – it is their money. But even if it is not, the impacts of fossil fuel investments are not limited to the stock owners themselves. The carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning are causing climate change that affects everyone on Earth. Furthermore, the “none of your business” argument would imply no divestment campaign was legitimate, meaning the harm caused by tobacco and apartheid South Africa would have gone on longer.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby brainpanhandler » Tue Mar 10, 2015 11:22 am

norton ash » Mon Mar 09, 2015 1:06 pm wrote:http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/gogama-derailment-shows-feds-need-to-act-on-train-safety-mpps-say-1.2986150

This is appalling. What didn't burn just poisoned an entire watershed.


Seems like an emerging pattern.

Speculation:

1) Radical activists are targeting and derailing these trains. Their logic is that whatever localized environmental damage is done is outweighed by the greater danger to the environment posed by continuing to burn fossil fuels. (Not endorsing, just speculating)

2) THEY want us to believe 1, but they are the ones derailing trains. Potentially a small investment depending on what the gains might be. What their motives would be beyond targeting climate activists and painting them as terrorists with no real concern for the environment is open to more speculation. See 3.

3) Perhaps a way to also advocate for the XL pipeline as a safer way to transport oil.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby 82_28 » Tue Mar 10, 2015 11:51 am

You gotta think that railways are the easiest target for those who wish to wreak havoc and turn it into a "thing". A ten minute walk would get me to some major railroad tracks that I suppose I could totally fuck up with a little planning. Don't worry government monitors, I would never dream of such a thing. But miles and miles of sensitive land.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Mar 10, 2015 2:04 pm

I don't think activists are doing it. I think our crumbling infrastructure, which we have not been able to afford to maintain for many decades, is doing it. Elites have hidden the facts that our bridges, rails, and tankers themselves are woefully rusting to oblivion from us, while the entire system was a developmental mistake from the start.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby brainpanhandler » Tue Mar 10, 2015 2:38 pm

Luther Blissett » Tue Mar 10, 2015 1:04 pm wrote:I don't think activists are doing it. I think our crumbling infrastructure, which we have not been able to afford to maintain for many decades, is doing it. Elites have hidden the facts that our bridges, rails, and tankers themselves are woefully rusting to oblivion from us, while the entire system was a developmental mistake from the start.


That's the most likely explanation. And could just be statistical clustering, but...

Also, we will pay for the infrastructure upgrades. Like digging our own graves.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Mar 10, 2015 2:47 pm

I just stumbled across an article, completely unrelated (in Salon so I won't bother linking it) that says the carloads of oil jumped from 9500 in 2008 to 500,000 in 2014. And those figures seem to check out. That's a staggering jump.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Nordic » Tue Mar 10, 2015 3:22 pm

brainpanhandler » Tue Mar 10, 2015 10:22 am wrote:
3) Perhaps a way to also advocate for the XL pipeline as a safer way to transport oil.



It has occurred to me, that since these oil exploiters are gonna ship the crap any way they can, in trucks, on crumbling railroads, whatever, it might actually be quite a bit safer for the environment to build a big new shiny pipeline so they don't fuck things up AS MUCH.

I sorta doubt that they are doing this on purpose so that we'll think of this and build the pipeline, or else we'd be seeing heavy propaganda exploitation of these train wrecks (literally, huh) for that purpose.

But yeah, just look at that godawful mess in Ontario. How would a pipeline be any worse than that?

And they're gonna pump the shit out of the ground and burn it ANYWAY.

Might not be a popular view, but a realistic one.

The only other real option is to simply ban this type of oil extraction. Which makes the most sense.

But as long as we live in a "free country" (yeah right) the oil companies are gonna suck the marrow out of Mother Earth's bones.

How many people realize how heavily involved Halliburton is in the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota? They are the main players.

Evil fucks.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby coffin_dodger » Tue Mar 10, 2015 4:19 pm

Luther Blissett wrote:I just stumbled across an article, completely unrelated (in Salon so I won't bother linking it) that says the carloads of oil jumped from 9500 in 2008 to 500,000 in 2014. And those figures seem to check out. That's a staggering jump.


Buffett’s $15 Billion From BNSF Show Railroad Came Cheap Nov 14 Bloomberg.com
Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Days after Warren Buffett announced his $26.5 billion buyout of railroad BNSF, he insisted that he’d paid a steep price to own a business that would benefit his company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., over the next century.

“You don’t get bargains on things like that,” he said in a November 2009 interview with Charlie Rose that aired on PBS. “It’s not cheap.”

Five years later, that assessment rings a bit hollow. Buoyed by an onshore oil boom, BNSF has become a cash machine for Buffett. The railroad had sent more than $15 billion in dividends to Berkshire through Sept. 30, according to quarterly regulatory filings, the latest of which was released last week. More stunning: The business is on pace to return all the cash Buffett spent taking it private by the end of this year.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-10/buffetts-15-billion-from-bnsf-show-railroad-came-cheap


Nothing 'insider' about that, eh?
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Mar 17, 2015 7:18 pm

The melting of Antarctica was already really bad. It just got worse.

A hundred years from now, humans may remember 2014 as the year that we first learned that we may have irreversibly destabilized the great ice sheet of West Antarctica, and thus set in motion more than 10 feet of sea level rise.

Meanwhile, 2015 could be the year of the double whammy — when we learned the same about one gigantic glacier of East Antarctica, which could set in motion roughly the same amount all over again. Northern Hemisphere residents and Americans in particular should take note — when the bottom of the world loses vast amounts of ice, those of us living closer to its top get more sea level rise than the rest of the planet, thanks to the law of gravity.

The findings about East Antarctica emerge from a new paper just out in Nature Geoscience by an international team of scientists representing the United States, Britain, France and Australia. They flew a number of research flights over the Totten Glacier of East Antarctica — the fastest-thinning sector of the world’s largest ice sheet — and took a variety of measurements to try to figure out the reasons behind its retreat. And the news wasn’t good: It appears that Totten, too, is losing ice because warm ocean water is getting underneath it.

“The idea of warm ocean water eroding the ice in West Antarctica, what we’re finding is that may well be applicable in East Antarctica as well,” says Martin Siegert, a co-author of the study and who is based at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.

The floating ice shelf of the Totten Glacier covers an area of 90 miles by 22 miles. It it is losing an amount of ice “equivalent to 100 times the volume of Sydney Harbour every year,” notes the Australian Antarctic Division.

That’s alarming, because the glacier holds back a much more vast catchment of ice that, were its vulnerable parts to flow into the ocean, could produce a sea level rise of more than 11 feet — which is comparable to the impact from a loss of the West Antarctica ice sheet. And that’s “a conservative lower limit,” says lead study author Jamin Greenbaum, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

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In its alignment with the land and the sea, the Totten Glacier is similar to the West Antarctic glaciers, which also feature ice shelves that slope out from the vast sheet of ice on land and extend into the water. These ice shelves are a key source of instability, because if ocean waters beneath them warm, they can lose ice rapidly, allowing the ice sheet behind them to flow more quickly into the sea.

The researchers used three separate types of measurements taken during their flights — gravitational measurements, radar and laser altimetry — to get a glimpse of what might be happening beneath the massive glacier, whose ice shelves are more than 1,600 feet thick in places. Using radar, they could measure the ice’s thickness. Meanwhile, by measuring the pull of the Earth’s gravity on the airplane in different places, the scientists were able to determine just how far below that ice the seafloor was.

The result was the discovery of two undersea troughs or valleys beneath the ice shelf — regions where the seafloor slopes downward, allowing a greater depth of water beneath the floating ice. These cavities or subsea valleys, the researchers suggest, may explain the glacier’s retreat — they could allow warmer deep waters to get underneath the ice shelf, accelerating its melting.

In this particular area of Antarctica, Greenbaum says, a warmer layer of ocean water offshore is actually deeper than the colder layers above it, because of the saltwater content of the warm water (which increases its density). And the canyons may allow that warm water access to the glacier base. “What we found here is that there are seafloor valleys deeper than the depth of the maximum temperature measured near the glacier,” Greenbaum says.

One of these canyons is three miles wide, in a region that was previously believed to simply hold ice lying atop solid earth. On the contrary, the new study suggests the ice is instead afloat.

The availability of warm water, and the observed melting, notes the study, “support the idea that the behaviour of Totten Glacier is an East Antarctic analogue to ocean-driven retreat underway in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The global sea level potential of 3.5 m flowing through Totten Glacier alone is of similar magnitude to the entire probable contribution of the WAIS.”

For Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University, the new research hints at a possible solution to a question that scientists have long had about the planet’s past — and in particular the Pliocene epoch, beginning 5.3 million years ago, when sea levels were dramatically higher, by as much as 40 meters.

“The sea-level indicators from the Pliocene have suggested that an important amount of ice came out of East Antarctica into the ocean,” says Alley. “Sedimentary records offshore pointed in the same way, and recent modeling…shows the strong potential for this to have happened. This new paper adds to the evidence — the pieces are fitting together.”

One limitation of the study is that the scientists were not able to directly measure the temperature of ocean water that is reaching the glacier itself. While this could be done with robotic underwater vehicles or other methods, that wasn’t part of the study at this time. Thus, the conclusions are more focused on inferring the vulnerability of the glacier based on a number of different pieces of evidence — topped off by the fact that the glacier is, indeed, retreating.

“What we need now is a confirmation of the findings of the paper from oceanographic data, because it is one thing to find potential pathways for warm water to intrude the cavity, it is another to show that this is actually happening,” observes Eric Rignot, an Antarctica expert at the University of California, Irvine. “This paper comes short of the latter, but other research efforts are underway to get critical oceanographic information near Totten.”

For residents of the United States — and indeed, the entire Northern Hemisphere — the impact of major ice loss from Antarctica could be dire. If Antarctica loses volumes of ice that would translate into major contributions to sea level rise, that rise would not be distributed evenly around the globe. The reason is the force of gravity. Antarctica is so massive that it pulls the ocean toward it, but if it loses ice, that gravitational pull will relax, and the ocean will slosh back toward the Northern Hemisphere — which will experience additional sea level rise.

For the United States, the amount of sea level rise could be 25 percent or more than the global average.

Much as with the ocean-abutting glaciers of West Antarctica, just because a retreat has been observed — and because the entirety of the region implies a sea level rise of 11 or more feet were all ice to end up in the ocean — does not mean that we’ll see anything near that much sea level rise in our lifetimes. These processes generally are expected to play out over hundreds of years or more. They would reshape the face of the Earth – but we may never see it.

The problem, then, is more the world we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren — because once such a gigantic geophysical process begins, it’s hard to see how it comes to a halt. “With warming oceans, it’s difficult to see how a process that starts now would be reversed, or reversible, in a warming world,” Siegert says.

Update: This article was updated to correct the size of the Totten Glacier. According to Greenbaum (but contrary to this press release), its floating portion (or ice shelf) is 90 miles by 22 miles in size.
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