How Bad Is Global Warming?

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 26, 2016 1:28 pm

Climate Nov. 25, 2016 03:35PM EST
Finland Set to Become First Country in the World to Ban Coal
Lorraine Chow Lorraine Chow


The Finnish government has announced plans to stop using coal, one of the the dirtiest fuels on the planet, by 2030.

"Finland is well positioned to be among the first countries in the world to enact a law to ban coal ... This will be my proposal," Minister of Economic Affairs Olli Rehn told Reuters.



This is all part of Finland's ambitious target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050.

"Giving up coal is the only way to reach international climate goals," Rehn added.

According to The Independent, the "Energy and Climate Strategy for 2030 and Beyond" is the country's plan to phase out coal within 14 years. Finland aims to turn its energy production carbon-neutral by 2050 with plans to switch its traditional energy sources to biofuels and renewable energy.

The strategy will be presented to the Finnish parliament for approval in March.

Currently, Finland gets only 8 percent energy from coal, mostly imported from Russia. Renewable sources and nuclear make up 45 percent and 34 percent respectively.

Finland is not the only country trying to stamp out coal—other European countries as well as Canada have similar plans. The state of Oregon also wants to phase out the carbon-polluting fuel.



However, Finland's plan appears to be much more strict. According to ZME Science, "In countries such as France or the UK where coal will be phased out, there will still be some leeway that will allow the trading the coal for instance. With a ban in place, not only will be Finnish utilities be barred from producing energy from coal, it will also be illegal to import electricity that is made from it—that's an entirely radical approach, but one that has a lot of positive environmental implications."

"Basically, coal would disappear from the Finnish market," Peter Lund, a researcher at Aalto University, and chair of the energy program at the European Academies' Science Advisory Council, told New Scientist.

Of course, not everyone in Finland is happy with the plan.

"The discussion about prohibiting the use of coal under law is inexplicable," Jukka Leskelä, the managing director of Finnish Energy, told the Helsinki Times. "Such an effort would not succeed without offering substantial compensation [to energy producers]. I fail to understand how the central administration can spend so recklessly and be so unappreciative of the situation in the energy markets."

Transport and Communications Minister Anne Berner also told the Associated Press that the emission targets for the transport sector is "demanding."

http://www.ecowatch.com/finland-ban-coa ... 9-85986361


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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby KUAN » Wed Nov 30, 2016 8:45 pm

Forgive the christian references; cumaan, Bob didn't believe that shit

Slow Train Coming



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijh42sc6P4E

Love that album cos it's rock
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby PufPuf93 » Thu Dec 01, 2016 3:14 pm

Important article and one example along with the mass extinction event as prime facie evidence that as far as humanity the environment is past a global tipping point.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ene ... ae97f02783

Scientists have long feared this ‘feedback’ to the climate system. Now they say it’s happening

At a time when a huge pulse of uncertainty has been injected into the global project to stop the planet’s warming, scientists have just raised the stakes even further.
In a massive new study published Wednesday in the influential journal Nature, no less than 50 authors from around the world document a so-called climate system “feedback” that, they say, could make global warming considerably worse over the coming decades.

That feedback involves the planet’s soils, which are a massive repository of carbon due to the plants and roots that have grown and died in them, in many cases over vast time periods (plants pull in carbon from the air through photosynthesis and use it to fuel their growth). It has long been feared that as warming increases, the microorganisms living in these soils would respond by very naturally upping their rate of respiration, a process that in turn releases carbon dioxide or methane, leading greenhouse gases.

It’s this concern that the new study validates. “Our analysis provides empirical support for the long-held concern that rising temperatures stimulate the loss of soil C to the atmosphere, driving a positive land C–climate feedback that could accelerate planetary warming over the twenty-first century,” the paper reports.
This, in turn, may mean that even humans’ best efforts to cut their emissions could fall short, simply because there’s another source of emissions all around us. The very Earth itself.

“By taking this global perspective, we’re able to see that there is a feedback, and it’s actually going to be massive,” said Thomas Crowther, a researcher with the Netherlands Institute of Ecology who led the research published Wednesday.
The new study is actually a compilation of 49 empirical studies, examining soil carbon emissions from research plots around the globe. The different studies produced variable results, including some cases in which soils actually pulled carbon from the air rather than releasing it. However, the researchers insist there was a pattern globally that was “predictable”: Soil carbon losses generally tended to track how much warming a region had seen, and how thick the upper soil layer was.

The paper therefore found that the biggest losses were in Arctic regions, where soils are warming rapidly and also where they are quite thick — but also that well down through the mid-latitudes, soils were also losing carbon. And the net result for the research plots as a whole was a loss of soil carbon.
The paper then extrapolated these findings for the globe, finding that by the year 2050, the planet could see 55 billion tons of carbon (which converts to 200 billion tons of carbon dioxide, were it all to be released in this form) released from soils. That’s if we continue on with a “business as usual” scenario of global greenhouse gas emissions and accompanying warming.

“It’s of the same order of magnitude as having an extra U.S. on the planet,” said Crowther. The world has less than 1,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide remaining to emit in order to preserve a reasonable chance of holding the planet’s warming below 2 degrees Celsius, a widely embraced target, so soil emissions could help to bust the carbon budget.

Crowther argues that until now, the science community has often left this potential carbon feedback from planetary soils out of its calculations because it wasn’t well enough understood. “The entire magnitude of this feedback was removed from several of the earth system models, the models that inform [the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], because of its massive uncertainty,” he says.

Moreover, he adds that while the study did heavily consider the Arctic and thus, regions of permafrost soil (a huge repository of planetary carbon), it only took into account emissions from the upper layer of soil, about 10 centimeters thick. So if warming liberates carbon from deeper permafrost layers too — a major fear — then the numbers presented above for soil emissions could be too small.

There is, of course, one potential offset to this — even as the Earth’s surface is losing carbon from soils, it also appears to be putting at least some back again due to an increased growth in vegetation, which is being fertilized by more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, in tern enhancing plant photosynthesis. However, Crowther does not believe this will suffice to offset soil carbon losses.

A recent study found that in the past decade or more, plant growth had indeed been sequestering more carbon dioxide — but as the lead author told the Post, “It’s good news for now. We can’t expect it to continue.”
Another researcher who focuses on Arctic soils and reviewed the study for the Post, permafrost expert Ted Schuur of Northern Arizona University, agreed with Crowther on plant growth, suggesting that even if models predict it may offset soil loses, field studies like the ones summarized here don’t support that.
“This impressive work again highlights the largest losses of soil C from high latitudes, which agrees with field measurement and incubations that we’ve summarized in our work,” said Schuur. “These losses offset gains that are predicted in soil C in other temperature and subtropical ecosystems.” Schur added that since the study only considers the first 10 centimeters of soil in the Arctic, “we might consider that a minimum loss since there is a lot of soil C beneath that.”
Two other outside experts contacted by the Post took a similar tack.

“The authors correctly point out the lack of information from tropical ecosystems, in fact the southern hemisphere is not represented. Thus we need more data,” said Charles Rice, a soil microbiology professor at Kansas State University who pointed out several limitations in the paper. But Rice nonetheless concluded that “the high latitudes are particularly vulnerable and a large source of CO2 back to the atmosphere. This highlights the need to do early action.”

The study gives “strong support to the hypothesis that soils will release a substantial amount of carbon in response to rising air temperatures,” added Jonathan Sanderman, a scientist with the Woods Hole Research Center who studies soil changes under climate change. “This is really critical, because if the additional release of carbon is not counterbalanced by new uptake of carbon by plants then it’s going to exacerbate climate change and increases the urgency to immediately reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

But Sanderman also noted studies have suggested that better management of agricultural soils could sequester large amounts of carbon, perhaps enough to offset the losses projected in the new study.

“While this paper shows how soils are part of the problem, it’s important to note that soils can also be part of the solution,” Sanderman continued.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Dec 02, 2016 3:58 pm

I prefer this slow train:
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Dec 04, 2016 9:36 pm

Climate scientists condemn article claiming global temperatures are falling
A Republican-led panel promoted a misleading tabloid story alleging earth may not be warming, relying on data that leaves out important points of context

Alan Yuhas

Saturday 3 December 2016 09.48 EST

Climate scientists have denounced the House committee on science, space and technology after the Republican-held panel promoted a misleading story expressing skepticism that the earth is dangerously warming.

On Thursday afternoon, the committee tweeted a Breitbart article alleging: “Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists”. The story linked to a British tabloid, the Daily Mail, which claimed that global land temperatures were plummeting, and that humans were not responsible for years of steadily increasing heat.


Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’
Read more
The Daily Mail story cited “Nasa satellite measurements of the lower atmosphere” without specifics, exaggerated the degree of the fall and left out three important points of context: how El Niño systems affect oceans and atmosphere, how ocean temperatures are rising, and the clear upward pattern of year-on-year changes.

“They’re not serious articles,” said Adam Sobel, a Columbia University climate scientist. “They paint it as though it’s an argument between Breitbart and Buzzfeed when it’s an argument between a snarky Breitbart blogger and the entire world’s scientific community, and the overwhelming body of scientific evidence.”

Sobel said the articles “grossly misinterpret” a few accurate details, for instance that El Niño and La Niña systems play a large role in single-year fluctuations. “The temperature goes up for a couple of years and we have the largest year on record, then it goes down and it reaches a level that’s still well above 20th-century historical averages,” he said. “That in no way disproves anything about the causes of the long-term temperature trends.”

Sobel called the committee’s use of Breitbart “distressing”. “If the House science committee wants to understand science they should talk to climate scientists.”

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, noted that 2016 would soon be the hottest year on record, “by a substantial margin” over 2015, which took the record from 2014.

“Three consecutive record-breaking warm years, something we’ve never seen before, and a reminder of the profound and deleterious impact that our profligate burning of fossil fuels is having on the planet,” he told the Guardian.

“For anyone, least of all the House committee on science, to at this particular moment be promoting fake news aimed at fooling the public into thinking otherwise, can only be interpreted as a deliberate effort to distract and fool the public.”

Promoting the articles, Mann said, “is beneath the dignity of anyone holding higher office”.

“This is an astounding example of cherry-picking the data,” said Kerry Emanuel, a professor at MIT. “Global land temperatures fluctuate significantly from one month to the next, and the article in question appears to have cherry-picked a drop on global land temperatures (not including the ocean, which covers 70% of the globe) for a single month.”

Emanuel left politics to the committee, adding: “You may draw your own conclusions as to motives.”

On their blog, a prominent climate writer who goes by the pseudonym Tamino, was less circumspect, saying the articles insulted readers by denying the melting ice, rising sea levels and floods and increased droughts around the world. “How stupid does he think you are?”

A spokesperson for the committee did not return emails or phone calls requesting comment about whether anyone vetted the articles. Since 2010, the Republican chairman of the committee, Lamar Smith, has written five op-eds for Breitbart, the far-right website with a record of denying climate change and racist and misogynistic writing. A spokesman for Smith, Nick Cartwright, said “there is not a relationship” between the congressman and the site.

The former chairman of Breitbart, Steve Bannon, was named by president-elect Donald Trump as his “chief strategist” in the Republican’s incoming administration.

Democrats on the committee berated their colleagues for the tweet, with ranking member EB Johnson saying it reflected a longer trend of anti-science action. Republicans, she said, had “attempted to intimidate NOAA’s scientists over climate change research results that they didn’t like, put forth a Nasa bill that gutted Earth science, and continuously attacked any effort on the part of the administration to deal with climate change”.

“This isn’t factual, it’s embarrassing, and Breitbart is not a credible news source,” wrote representative Don Beyer. “We need to bring *science* back to the Science Committee .”

Representative Zoe Lofgren wrote: “Sign these guys up for the flat earth society.”


Fake news detector for Facebook leads to fake news story about who made it
Read more
Senator Bernie Sanders, who has said he intends to fight Republicans who would dismantle climate change measures, mocked the committee by alluding to the president-elect’s defunct real estate school, which closed and was accused of fraud. “Where’d you get your PhD?” Sanders asked. “Trump University?”

Several leading Republicans on the committee did not reply to requests for comment.

Democrats and Republicans each have their own teams of staffers for the committee, but share a news clipping service for providing information to elected officials. Since their party holds a majority in the House, the Republican team controls the search terms for what news clips are culled, said Kristen Kopshever, a spokeswoman for the Democrats’ office.

“It’s constantly like the the Daily Caller and Texas GOP Vote Blog and just these random conservative publications that have made it into our clips,” she said. Kopshever echoed the representatives, noting that Smith had aggressively pursued investigations: intervening in a fraud case against ExxonMobil and the inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s email server, for instance.

Kopshever said her office tried to rely on apolitical sources, such as Science Magazine and the academic journal Nature, and that she could not speak for her Republican counterparts. “I don’t know what their process is,” she said. “We don’t work a lot together.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... misleading


Global Warming Research in Danger as Trump Appoints Climate Skeptic to NASA Team

Alleen Brown
December 1 2016, 12:54 p.m.
ONE OF NASA’S most high-profile projects has been to track historical average global temperature. In January 2016, the agency released data that showed 2015 had been the hottest year on record. “Today’s announcement not only underscores how critical NASA’s Earth observation program is, it is a key data point that should make policy makers stand up and take notice — now is the time to act on climate,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in a statement at the time. Since then, NASA’s monthly updates on temperature delivered a steady dose of dread as month after month was declared the hottest recorded.

Now Donald Trump’s first NASA transition team pick is Christopher Shank, a Hill staffer who has said he is unconvinced of a reality that is accepted by the vast majority of climate scientists: that humans are the primary driver of climate change. Shank previously worked for Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican congressman who played a key role in dragging out debates on the basic nature of climate change at a time when the science is settled and action is urgent.

Shank has criticized the type of scientific data NASA regularly releases. As part of a panel in September 2015 at Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes, he said, “The rhetoric that’s coming out, the hottest year in history, actually is not backed up by the science — or that the droughts, the fires, the hurricanes, etc., are caused by climate change, but it’s just weather.”

He shrugged off the severity of the climate crisis, criticizing “the rhetoric about, let’s call this climate pollution, which is CO2, which I’m emitting here today.” And he mockingly asked: “is this really about some neo-Malthusian discussion about population control that we’re talking about here?” That was a reference to Thomas Malthus, the late 18th century thinker who predicted a resource crisis if population growth continued unchecked. “What are we trying to solve here?” he asked.

Shank’s appointment dovetails with threats from Trump’s advisors to scrap NASA’s research on climate change. In an October op-ed for Space News, Trump campaign advisors Robert Walker and Peter Navarro stated, “NASA should be focused primarily on deep space activities rather than Earth-centric work that is better handled by other agencies.”

Walker told The Guardian last week, “I believe that climate research is necessary, but it has been heavily politicized, which has undermined a lot of the work that researchers have been doing. Mr Trump’s decisions will be based upon solid science, not politicized science.”

David Titley, director of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at Penn State, wrote in response, “We can measure the Earth as an entire system only from space.”

NASA works with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to measure climate changes. NASA’s role includes developing observational technologies.

“If they really shut down the satellites, we’d be driving in the dark, in the fog, with no headlights, on a mountain road,” Titley said in an interview. Analyzing the satellite data reveals inconvenient truths, he said. “What they will find is the vast scientific consensus is correct. The earth is warming. We know why it’s warming. And it will continue to warm as we add greenhouse gases into the system.”

“Even in the post-truth world, shouting and screaming in all caps at 3 in the morning is not going to change the physics,” he said.

Shank’s longtime boss Smith, the Republican head of the House Science, Space, and Technology committee, led an effort to slash NASA’s earth science budget this year and in 2011 requested an investigation into the “politicization of NASA.”

Smith is obsessed with combatting what he has called “climate religion.” Among other things, Smith has accused scientists with NOAA of altering peer-reviewed data that challenged a key argument of climate deniers, the notion that the global temperature rises have stalled.

Shank was Smith’s deputy chief of staff from 2011 to 2013, before becoming a senior staffer for the House science committee, which Smith has led since 2012. Before the House, Shank worked at NASA between 2005 and 2009, serving in various roles, including as chief of strategic communications. He did not respond to a request for comment.

At the September 2015 panel, Shank went on to question humans’ role in climate change, repeatedly recommending that attendees read the work of Judith Curry, Roger Pielke Jr., and Roger Pielke Sr. “I find them to be the best source of commentary on climate issues and what to do about it,” he said. At one point he repeated Curry’s blog URL twice, for emphasis.

Pielke Jr., a professor at the University of Colorado, has testified before Smith’s committee arguing, “There exists exceedingly little scientific support for claims found in the media and political debate that hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and drought have increased in frequency or intensity on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.”

Titley chaired a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that issued a report last March on the science of attributing weather events to climate. The study indicated scientists now have a strong understanding of how climate impacts extreme heat and cold events and a moderate understanding of how it impacts drought and heavy rain. “When I listen to people like Pielke talk about how we can’t show tornadoes have increased, it doesn’t negate fact that seas are rising, temperatures are rising, the magnitude and severity of droughts are increasing, as well as impacting our food and our water systems,” Titley said.

The other scientist Shank mentioned, Curry, is a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and is notorious for her view that humans may not be the primary driver of climate change. In a recent blog post, she zeroed in on NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies as the agency’s hub of what she called “politicized climate science.”

Curry noted that NASA has given her more research funding than any other agency. She advocated for continuing support for NASA earth science projects, but added, “This is a welcome opportunity to redirect NASA Earth Science research towards other topics that are not directly related to or motivated by human caused climate change.”

Update: December 2, 2016

This story has been updated to clarify that Shank was talking about Roger Pielke Junior and Senior.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Mon Dec 05, 2016 3:47 pm

Sorry about posting the VF vid here.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Mon Dec 05, 2016 6:25 pm

"People get ready" - good advice.

If this goes ahead that's it for us:

Mr Adani, Prime Minister Turnbull and Queensland Premier Palaszczuk want to dig one of the world’s biggest polluting coal mines.

Billionaire polluter Gautam Adani meets with Queensland Premier Palaszczuk in Townsville on Tuesday.

Tell Mr Adani – we the people don’t want Adani’s mine.

Give our reef, people and planet a chance.

Will you come to Tobruk Memorial Baths at 8am Tuesday morning? Bring your friends. Wear bright colours!

#reefnotcoal


The meeting is on now as I type 1000 miles north of here. If this mine happens it will finish the barrier reef and blow what is left of our planets Carbon budget.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Tue Dec 06, 2016 2:13 am

I now realize I meant to post the VF video here as a response to Kuan's "Slow Train Comin". But yeah, Joe "People get ready" is not bad advice. It's sad that competition for markets exists, because there will always be those seeking to grow their market share by crushing competition with cheaper prices before absorbing them lock, stock & barrel. But who could possibly market their commodity at lower labor costs than the Chinese or India? No one. So no one should try to, but regardless, they will try. And we will die.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby American Dream » Wed Dec 07, 2016 2:52 pm

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Wed Dec 07, 2016 3:16 pm

Extreme downpours could increase fivefold across parts of the U.S.
A warming climate would also boost individual storm intensity


December 5, 2016

BOULDER, Colo. — At century's end, the number of summertime storms that produce extreme downpours could increase by more than 400 percent across parts of the United States — including sections of the Gulf Coast, Atlantic Coast, and the Southwest — according to a new study by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

The study, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, also finds that the intensity of individual extreme rainfall events could increase by as much as 70 percent in some areas. That would mean that a storm that drops about 2 inches of rainfall today would be likely to drop nearly 3.5 inches in the future.

"These are huge increases," said NCAR scientist Andreas Prein, lead author of the study. "Imagine the most intense thunderstorm you typically experience in a single season. Our study finds that, in the future, parts of the U.S. could expect to experience five of those storms in a season, each with an intensity as strong or stronger than current storms."

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR's sponsor, and the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America.

“Extreme precipitation events affect our infrastructure through flooding, landslides and debris flows,” said Anjuli Bamzai, program director in NSF’s Directorate for Geosciences, which funded the research. “We need to better understand how these extreme events are changing. By supporting this research, NSF is working to foster a safer environment for all of us.”

Image
The figure shows the expected increase in the number of summertime storms that produce extreme precipitation at century's end compared to the period 2000 - 2013. (©UCAR. Courtesy Andreas Prein, NCAR. This image is freely available for media & nonprofit use.)

A year of supercomputing time

An increase in extreme precipitation is one of the expected impacts of climate change because scientists know that as the atmosphere warms, it can hold more water, and a wetter atmosphere can produce heavier rain. In fact, an increase in precipitation intensity has already been measured across all regions of the U.S. However, climate models are generally not able to simulate these downpours because of their coarse resolution, which has made it difficult for researchers to assess future changes in storm frequency and intensity.

For the new study, the research team used a new dataset that was created when NCAR scientists and study co-authors Roy Rasmussen, Changhai Liu, and Kyoko Ikeda ran the NCAR-based Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model at a resolution of 4 kilometers, fine enough to simulate individual storms. The simulations, which required a year to run, were performed on the Yellowstone system at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center.

Prein and his co-authors used the new dataset to investigate changes in downpours over North America in detail. The researchers looked at how storms that occurred between 2000 and 2013 might change if they occurred instead in a climate that was 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer — the temperature increase expected by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated.

Prein cautioned that this approach is a simplified way of comparing present and future climate. It doesn't reflect possible changes to storm tracks or weather systems associated with climate change. The advantage, however, is that scientists can more easily isolate the impact of additional heat and associated moisture on future storm formation.

"The ability to simulate realistic downpours is a quantum leap in climate modeling. This enables us to investigate changes in hourly rainfall extremes that are related to flash flooding for the very first time," Prein said. "To do this took a tremendous amount of computational resources."

Impacts vary across the U.S.

The study found that the number of summertime storms producing extreme precipitation is expected to increase across the entire country, though the amount varies by region. The Midwest, for example, sees an increase of zero to about 100 percent across swaths of Nebraska, the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Iowa. But the Gulf Coast, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico all see increases ranging from 200 percent to more than 400 percent.

The study also found that the intensity of extreme rainfall events in the summer could increase across nearly the entire country, with some regions, including the Northeast and parts of the Southwest, seeing particularly large increases, in some cases of more than 70 percent.

A surprising result of the study is that extreme downpours will also increase in areas that are getting drier on average, especially in the Midwest. This is because moderate rainfall events that are the major source of moisture in this region during the summertime are expected to decrease significantly while extreme events increase in frequency and intensity. This shift from moderate to intense rainfall increases the potential for flash floods and mudslides, and can have negative impacts on agriculture.

The study also investigated how the environmental conditions that produce the most severe downpours might change in the future. In today's climate, the storms with the highest hourly rainfall intensities form when the daily average temperature is somewhere between 20 and 25 degrees C (68 to 77 degrees F) and with high atmospheric moisture. When the temperature gets too hot, rainstorms become weaker or don't occur at all because the increase in atmospheric moisture cannot keep pace with the increase in temperature. This relative drying of the air robs the atmosphere of one of the essential ingredients needed to form a storm.

In the new study, the NCAR scientists found that storms may continue to intensify up to temperatures of 30 degrees C because of a more humid atmosphere. The result would be much more intense storms.

"Understanding how climate change may affect the environments that produce the most intense storms is essential because of the significant impacts that these kinds of storms have on society," Prein said.

About the article

Title: The future intensification of hourly precipitation extremes

Authors: Andreas F. Prein, Roy M. Rasmussen, Kyoko Ikeda, Changhai Liu, Martyn P. Clark, and Greg J. Holland

Journal: Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE3168

Writer:
Laura Snider, Senior Science Writer and Public Information Officer


http://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/124334/extreme-downpours-could-increase-fivefold-across-parts-us

Nature Climate Change
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/index.html
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Rory » Wed Dec 07, 2016 5:12 pm

Tweet from Mark Ames

Pruitt's Oklahoma is the Bashkortostan of America—a mean, corrupt backwater oligarchy. Bad days ahead.


https://thinkprogress.org/scott-pruitt- ... b67c9fb2a9
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby smoking since 1879 » Thu Dec 08, 2016 10:01 am

"Now that the assertive, the self-aggrandising, the arrogant and the self-opinionated have allowed their obnoxious foolishness to beggar us all I see no reason in listening to their drivelling nonsense any more." Stanilic
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Dec 26, 2016 6:15 pm

Google Earth Shows 30 Years of Climate Change

Published: December 23rd, 2016

By Brian Kahn

Satellites have revolutionized the way we see the world. Since the first satellite image of earth was taken in 1959, they’ve captured a world reshaped by humans.

Cities have risen, lakes have dried out, ice shelves have disappeared and the future of energy has begun popping up in deserts and fields around the world. Human ingenuity put the satellites into orbit hundreds of miles above the earth to chronicle these changes. And now human ingenuity has strung together decades of images to crystalize what those changes look like in every corner of the globe.

Google has been collecting a database of imagery from the Landsat and Sentinel satellite systems that spans 1984 until the present. It’s part of a petabyte-scale database from our eyes in the sky (for reference, you’d need 31,250 iPhone 7s — the basic 32 gigabyte version — to store a single petabyte of data). Using their Earth Engine system, anyone with an internet connection can see those changes. Here are some of the starkest and most hopeful timelapses of our planet.


Some truly remarkable images at the link.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jan 10, 2017 6:09 pm

Ticking Carbon Clock Warns We Have One Year to Avert Climate Catastrophe

Under the most pessimistic scenario, the planet has just one year until global temperatures surpass 1.5ºC of warming

by Nika Knight, staff writer

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Our window of time to act on climate may be shrinking even faster than previously thought.

We may only have one year remaining before we lock in 1.5ºC of warming—the ideal goal outlined in the Paris climate agreement—after which we'll see catastrophic and irreversible climate shifts, many experts have warned.

That's according to the ticking carbon budget clock created by the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC). The clock's countdown now shows that only one year is left in the world's carbon budget before the planet heats up more than 1.5º over pre-industrial temperatures.

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That's under the most pessimistic calculations. According to the most optimistic prediction, we have four years to kick our carbon habit and avert 1.5º of warming.

And to limit warming to 2ºC—the limit agreed upon in the Paris climate accord—we have nine years to act under the most pessimistic scenario, and 23 years to act under the most optimistic.

"So far, there is no track record for reducing emissions globally," explained Fabian Löhe, spokesperson for MCC, in an email to Common Dreams. "Instead, greenhouse gas emissions have been rising at a faster pace during the last decade than previously—despite growing awareness and political action across the globe. Once we have exhausted the carbon budget, every ton of CO2 that is released by cars, buildings, or industrial plants would need to be compensated for during the 21st century by removing the CO2 from the atmosphere again. Generating such 'negative emissions' is even more challenging and we do not know today at which scale we might be able to do that."

(Climate activists and environmentalists have also long warned of the potential negative consequences of geoengineering and other carbon capture schemes, as Common Dreams has reported.)

"Hence, the clock shows that time is running out: it is not enough to act sometime in the future, but it is necessary to implement more ambitious climate policies already in the very short-term," Löhe added.

"Take all of the most difficult features of individual pathways to 2ºC—like fast and ambitious climate action in all countries of the world, the full availability of all required emissions reduction and carbon removal technologies, as well as aggressive energy demand reductions across the globe—the feasibility of which were so heatedly debated prior to Paris," Löhe said. "This gives you an idea of the challenge associated with the more ambitious 1.5°C goal."


One point being missed here: there is a 30-40 year timelag between carbon emissions and global temperature increase. Not sure if that was calculated into the research; if it was: it doesn't matter because oil and other carbon consuming corporations are about to see deregulation in a HUUUGE way for at least the next four years - if it wasn't: then we're really screwed.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby KUAN » Thu Jan 12, 2017 12:47 am

Almost 75% of Japan's biggest coral reef has died from bleaching, says report
Coral in the Sekisei lagoon in Okinawa has turned brown and is covered with algae, according to a government study
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