How Bad Is Global Warming?

[DrEvil]

Interesting that Al Gore is predicted to become one of the first global warming BILLIONAIRES ain't it. And that the carbon footprint of his mansion estate is HUGE. Al Gore wants the rest of us to live like primitives, or "pay our fair share of carbon tax revenue" while he slowly becomes a carbon tax billionaire.

Actually it's not interesting at all. He saw the writing on the wall and invested accordingly.
He's been harping on about climate change since the seventies at least, and why are people so obsessed with him anyway? Do you think that discrediting him will make climate change go away? Or are you just posting nonsense because you have nothing of substance to add?
"Climate going to shit you say? LOOK OVER THERE! IT'S AL GORE!"

Riddle of the day: A man made of straw is..?

There should be a version of Godwin's Law for Al Gore and climate change.

[backtoiam]

nahhhh, just stating the obvious. He should lower his "carbon footprint" if he is so concerned.

usual suspects

[backtoiam]

Puff

The reverse to my argument is what is used by "experts" to justify the carbon credit system.

Hello to you to puff. I always enjoy your input because i consider you to be a genuine person and contributor.

My problem with this situation is that the very persons that "pretend" to be concerned about climate change are also heavily invested in making sure it comes true. This involves everybody from the petro industry on down.

In the stock market it is called "selling short."

Set up an industry for failure, "sell it short", wait on it to fail, and reap trillions. The people that do this are looking at "generational wealth" that are put into trust funds that are virtually untouchable to keep the system of theft going.

And so it goes. That you for your comment puff.

[DrEvil]

nahhhh, just stating the obvious. He should lower his "carbon footprint" if he is so concerned.

usual suspects

Ad hominem

Again: Do you have anything of substance to contribute?

Edit:

My problem with this situation is that the very persons that "pretend" to be concerned about climate change are also heavily invested in making sure it comes true. This involves everybody from the petro industry on down.

Right. That must be why the oil industry is being sued for lying about the dangers of climate change.
This is some of the dumbest shit I've seen on here for a while.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

A timely offering from the Archdruid, given recent postings in this thread:

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... ortem.html

Climate Change Activism: A Post-Mortem

As I write these words, much of North America is sweltering under near-tropical heat and humidity. Parts of the Middle East have set all-time high temperatures for the Old World, coming within a few degrees of Death Valley’s global record. The melting of the Greenland ice cap has tripled in recent years, and reports from the arctic coast of Siberia describe vast swathes of tundra bubbling with methane as the permafrost underneath them melts in 80°F weather. Far to the south, seawater pours through the streets of Miami Beach whenever a high tide coincides with an onshore wind; the slowing of the Gulf Stream, as the ocean’s deep water circulation slows to a crawl, is causing seawater to pile up off the Atlantic coast of the US, amplifying the effect of sea level rise.

All these things are harbingers of a profoundly troubled future. All of them were predicted, some in extensive detail, in the print and online literature of climate change activism over the last few decades. Not that long ago, huge protest marches and well-funded advocacy organizations demanded changes that would prevent these things from happening, and politicians mouthed slogans about stopping global warming in its tracks. Somehow, though, the marchers went off to do something else with their spare time, the advocacy organizations ended up preaching to a dwindling choir, and the politicians started using other slogans to distract the electorate.

The last gasp of climate change activism, the COP-21 conference in Paris late last year, resulted in a toothless agreement that binds no nation anywhere on earth to cut back on the torrents of greenhouse gases they’re currently pumping into the atmosphere. The only commitments any nation was willing to make amounted to slowing, at some undetermined point in the future, the rate at which the production of greenhouse gas pollutants is increasing. In the real world, meanwhile, enough greenhouse gases have already been dumped into the atmosphere to send the world’s climate reeling; sharp cuts in greenhouse gas output, leading to zero net increase in atmospheric CO2 and methane by 2050 or so, would still not have been enough to stop extensive flooding of coastal cities worldwide and drastic unpredictable changes in the rain belts that support agriculture and keep all seven billion of us alive. The outcome of COP-21 simply means that we’re speeding toward even more severe climatic disasters with the pedal pressed not quite all the way to the floor.

Thus it’s not inappropriate to ask what happened to all the apparent political momentum the climate change movement had ten or fifteen years ago, and why a movement so apparently well organized, well funded, and backed by so large a scientific consensus failed so completely.

In my experience, at least, if you raise this question among climate change activists, the answer you’ll get is that there was a well-funded campaign that deployed disinformation against them. So? Every movement for social change in human history has been confronted by well-funded vested interests that deployed disinformation against them. Consider the struggle for same-sex marriage, which triumped during the same years that saw climate change activism go down to defeat. The disinformation deployed against same-sex marriage was epic in its scale as well as its raw dishonesty—do you recall the claims that ministers would be forced to perform gay weddings, and that letting same-sex couples marry would cause society to fall apart? I do—and yet the movement for same-sex marriage brushed that aside and achieved its goal.

Blaming the failure of climate change activism entirely on the opposition, in other words, is a copout. It’s also a way to avoid learning the lessons of failure—and here as elsewhere, those who ignore their history are condemned to repeat it. Other movements for social change faced comparable opposition and overcame it, while climate change activism failed to do so; that’s the difference that needs to be discussed, and it leads inexorably to a consideration of the mistakes that were made by the movement.

The most important mistakes, to my mind, are these:

First, the climate change movement was largely led and directed by scientists, and as discussed here two weeks ago, people with a scientific education suck at politics. Over and over again, the leaders of the climate change movement waved around their credentials and told everyone else what to do, in the fond delusion that that’s an adequate way to bring about political change. Not so; too many people outside the scientific community have watched scientific opinion whirl around like a weathercock on too many issues; too many products labeled safe and effective by qualified scientists have been put on the market, and then turned out to be ineffective and unsafe; too many people simply don’t trust the guys in the white lab coats any more—and some of them have valid reasons for that lack of trust. Thus a movement that based its entire political strategy on the prestige of science was hamstrung from the start.

Second, the climate change movement made the same mistake that the Remain side made in the recent Brexit vote in the UK, and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign seems to be making on this side of the pond: it formulated its campaign in purely negative terms. David Cameron failed because he couldn’t talk about anything except how dreadful it would be if Britain left the EU, and Clinton’s campaign is failing because her supporters can’t talk about anything but the awfulness of Donald Trump. In exactly the same way, the climate change movement spent all its time harping about the global catastrophes that were going to happen if they didn’t get their way, and never really got around to talking about anything else—and so it failed, too.

I’m not sure why this sort of strategy has become such a broken record in contemporary political life, because it simply doesn’t work. People have heard it so many times, if all you can talk about is how awful this or that or the other thing is, they will roll their eyes and walk away. To win their interest, their enthusiasm, and their votes, you have to offer them something to look forward to. That doesn’t mean you have to promise rainbows and jellybeans; you can promise them blood, toil, tears, and sweat; you can warn them of a long struggle ahead and call them to shared sacrifice, and they’ll eat it up—but there has to be a light at the end of the tunnel, something that doesn’t just amount to the indefinite continuation of a miserably unsatisfactory status quo.

The climate change movement never noticed that, and so people quickly got tired of the big bass drum going “doom, doom, doom,” all the time, and wandered away. It didn’t have to be like that; the climate change movement could have front-and-centered the vision of a grand new era of green industry, with millions of new working-class jobs blossoming as America leapt ahead of the oh-so-twentieth-century fossil-fueled economies of other nations, but it apparently never occurred to anyone to do that. Instead, the climate change movement did a really fine impression of a crowd of officious busybodies trotting out round after round of doleful jeremiads about the awful future that would swallow us up if we didn’t do what they said, and that did about as much good as it usually does.

Third, the climate change movement inflicted a disastrous own goal on itself by insisting that nobody with scientific credentials ever claimed that an ice age was imminent, when anybody over fifty whose memory is intact knows that that’s simply not true. Any of my readers who are minded to debate this point should get and read the following books from the 1970s and 1980s: The Weather Machine by Nigel Calder, After the Ice by E.C. Pielou, and Ice Ages by Windsor Chorlton and the editors of Time Life Books. These were very popular in their time, and they’re all available on the used book market for a few bucks each, as the links I’ve just given demonstrate. Nigel Calder was a respected science writer; E.C. Pielou is still the doyenne of Canadian field ecologists, and the third book was part of Time Life Book’s Planet Earth series, each volume of which was supervised by scientific experts in the relevant fields. All three books discuss the coming of a new ice age as the most likely future state of Earth’s climate.

While you’re at it, you might also pick up a couple of really good science fiction novels, The Winter of the World by Poul Anderson and The Time of the Great Freeze by Robert Silverberg. Anderson and Silverberg were major SF authors in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when success in the genre depended on close attention to scientific fact, and both authors drew on what were then considered credible forecasts of an approaching ice age to ground their stories about the future. If you’re going to insist, along the lines of George Orwell’s 1984, that Oceania has never been allied with Eurasia, you’d better make sure that nobody’s in a position to check. If they can, and they discover that you’re lying, your chance to convince them to trust you about anything else has just gone out the window once and for all. That’s how a great many people responded to the climate change movement’s attempt to rewrite history and erase the ice age scare of the 1970s and 1980s.

Every time I’ve brought up this issue among climate change activists, they’ve responded by insisting that I must be a climate change denialist. That’s the fourth factor that’s contributed mightily to the crumpling of the climate change movement: the rise within that movement of a culture of intolerance in which dissent is demonized and asking questions about tactics and strategy is equated with disloyalty. I’m thinking here especially, though not only, of an embarrassing screed by climate change activist Naomi Oreskes, which insisted with a straight face that asking questions about whether renewables can replace fossil fuels is “a new form of climate denialism”. As it happens, there are serious practical questions about whether anything—renewable or otherwise—can replace fossil fuels and still allow the inmates of today’s industrial societies to maintain their current lifestyles, but Oreskes doesn’t want to hear it: for her, loyalty to the cause demands blindness to the facts. As a way to alienate potential allies and drive away existing supporters, that attitude’s hard to beat.

Stunning political naïveté, a purely negative campaign, a disastrous own goal through a constantly repeated and easily detected falsehood, and an internal culture of intolerance and demonization: those four factors would have been a heavy burden for any movement for social change, and any two of them would most likely have caused the failure of climate change activism all by themselves. There was, however, another factor at work, and to my mind it was the most important of all.

To understand that fifth factor, it’s useful to return to a distinction I made here two weeks ago between facts, values, and interests. Facts are simply statements of what happened, what’s happening, and what will happen given X set of conditions—the things, in other words, that science is supposed to be about. Whether or not anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are causing the global climate to spin out of control, whether or not books published in the 1970s and 1980s by reputable scientists and science writers predicted a coming ice age, whether or not the project of replacing fossil fuels with renewable resources faces serious difficulties—these are questions of fact.

Facts by themselves simply state a case. Values determine what we should do about them. Consider the factual statement “unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for an ongoing increase in weather-related disasters.” If the rate of weather-related disasters doesn’t concern you, that fact doesn’t require any action from you; it’s when you factor in “weather-related disasters ought to be minimized where possible,” which is a value judgment, that you can go on to “therefore we should cut greenhouse gas emissions.” Not all value judgments are as uncontroversial as the one just named, but we can let that pass for now, because it’s the third element that’s at issue in the present case.

Beyond facts and values are interests: who benefits and who loses from any given public policy. If, let’s say, we decide that greenhouse gas emissions should be cut, the next step takes us squarely into the realm of interests. Whose pocketbook gets raided to pay for the cuts? Whose lifestyle choices are inconvenienced by them? Whose jobs are eliminated because of them? The climate change movement has by and large treated these as irrelevant details, but they’re nothing of the kind. Politics is always about interests. If you want your facts to be accepted and your values taken seriously, you need to be able to respond to people’s interests—to offer an arrangement whereby everybody gets something they need out of the deal, and no one side has to carry all the costs.

That, in turn, is exactly what the climate change movement has never gotten around to doing.

I’d like to suggest a thought experiment here, to show just how the costs and benefits offered by the climate change movement stacked up. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that there’s an industry in today’s industrial nations that churns out colossal amounts of greenhouse gases every single day. It doesn’t produce anything necessary for human life or well-being; it’s simply a convenience, and one that, not that many decades ago, most people in the industrial world did without and never thought they’d need. If it were to be shut down, sure, a certain number of people would lose their jobs, but most of the steps that have been urged by climate change activists would have that effect; other than that, and a certain amount of inconvenience for its current users, the only result would be a sharp decrease in the amount of carbon dioxide and certain other greenhouse gases being dumped into the atmosphere. That being the case, shouldn’t climate change activists get to work right now to shut down that industry, and shouldn’t they start off by boycotting it themselves?

The industry in question actually exists. It’s the commercial air travel industry.

You may have noticed, dear reader, that nobody in the climate change movement has been out there protesting commercial air travel, and precious few of them are even willing to cut back on their flying time, even though commercial air travel a massive contributor to the problems the movement claims to be fighting. I know of two scientists researching climate change who have pointed out that there’s something just a little bit hypocritical about flying all over the world on jetliners to attend conferences discussing how we all have to decrease our carbon footprint! Their colleagues, needless to say, haven’t listened. Neither has the rest of the climate change movement; like Al Gore, who might as well be their poster child, they keep on racking up their frequent flyer miles.

On the other hand, climate change activists are eager to shut down coal mining. What’s the most significant difference between coal mining and commercial air travel? Coal mining provides wages for the working poor; commercial air travel provides amenities for the affluent.

The difference isn’t accidental, either. Across the board, the climate change movement has pushed for changes that will penalize people in what I’ve called the wage class, the majority of Americans who depend on an hourly wage for their income. The movement has gone out of its way to avoid pushing for changes that will penalize people in what I’ve called the salary class, the affluent minority of Americans who bring home a monthly salary. That isn’t a minor point. There’s the hard fact that, on average, the more money you make, the bigger your carbon footprint is—but there’s also a political issue, and it goes to the heart of the failure of the climate change movement.

I’ve had any number of well-meaning climate change activists ask me, in tones of baffled despair, why they can’t get ordinary Americans to take climate change seriously. My answer is not one they want to hear, because I tell them that it’s because well-meaning climate change activists don’t take climate change seriously. If you don’t care enough about the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to accept some inconveniences to your own lifestyle, how much do you actually care about it? That’s the kind of logic that ordinary Americans use all the time to judge whether someone is serious about a cause or simply grandstanding, and by and large, climate change activism fails that sniff test.

Ordinary Americans, furthermore, are all too used to seeing grandiose rhetoric deployed by the affluent to load yet another round of burdens onto ordinary Americans. It’s not the affluent, after all, who have been inconvenienced by the last thirty years of environmental regulations, trade treaties, or what have you. To wage class Americans, anthropogenic climate change is just more of the same, another excuse to take jobs away from the working poor while sedulously avoiding anything that would inconvenience the middle and upper middle classes. The only way climate change activists could have evaded that response from wage class Americans would have been to demonstrate that they were willing to carry some of the costs themselves—and that was exactly what they weren’t willing to do.

The bitter irony in all this, of course, is that the climate change movement was right about two very important things all along: treating the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer in which to dump wastes from our smokestacks and tailpipes was a really dumb idea, and the blowback from that idiocy is going to cost us—all of us—in blood. Right now all three of the earth’s major ice caps—the Greenland, West Antarctic, and East Antarctic ice sheets—have tipped over into instability; climate belts are lurching drunkenly north and south, putting agriculture at risk in far more places than a crowded, hungry planet can afford; drought-kindled wildfires in the American and Canadian west and in Siberia are burning out of control...and unless something significant changes, it’s just going to keep on getting worse, year after year, decade after decade, until every coastal city on the planet is under water, the western half of North America is as dry as the Sahara, glaciers and snowfall are distant memories, and famine, war, and disease have left the human population of the planet a good deal smaller than it is today.

That didn’t have to happen. It might still be possible to avoid the worst of it, if enough people who are concerned about climate change stop pretending that their own lifestyles aren’t part of the problem, stop saying “personal change isn’t enough” and pretending that this means personal change isn’t necessary, stop trying to push all the costs of change onto people who’ve taken it in the teeth for decades already, and show the only kind of leadership that actually counts—yes, that’s leadership by example. It would probably help, too, if they stopped leaning so hard on the broken prestige of science, found a positive vision of the future to talk about now and then, backed away from trying to rewrite the recent past, and dropped the habit of demonizing honest disagreement. Still, to my mind, the crucial thing is that the affluent liberals who dominate the climate change movement are going to have to demonstrate that they’re willing to take one for the team.

Will they? I’d love to be proved wrong, but I doubt it—and in that case we’re in for a very rough road in the centuries ahead.

A few excerpted snippets from the comments section:

doomerdoc said...

Let me pour some ice onto everybody reading this blog who would consider themselves fairly comfortable, income and money wise. Nothing wrong with that, but let me just pour the ice.

The vast majority of people on this planet, including the developed world, have one thing on their minds...how they are going to pay for food and housing. That, and that alone, is the only thing that even keeps them showing up for work, let alone getting involved in anything political or activism of any sort.

You think they are going to get involved in anything as esoteric as climate change?

So you have to convince people that without climate action, they don't have food, jobs, or housing. But that's not exactly correct, is it, because the system, the vast burning of fossil fuels, is the only thing providing them with food, jobs, and housing! Quite the catch-22.

4threvolutionarywar said...

Great Essay! (As usual)

A couple of points:

-There are really serious questions about whether it will EVER be possible to construct a radical political coalition around "Environmental" issues. Humans are not wired to self-organize around carbon particles per million. So many apparently smart and well meaning people have devoted so much time and energy to this project, that I tend to suspect it failed because it is a political dead end that leads nowhere.

-I have been a radical environmentalist since the Reagan era, and in that time I have been exposed to more doomsday theories than I can count. The American environmental movement has produced is a vast literature of impending doomsday going back to the sixties and before. Most of it is extremely embarrassing at this point, but everyone who was skeptical about it at the time was treated to exactly the same moral and intellectual arrogance that is now on display in the "Climate Change" movement.

-Every previous prediction of immanent doom turned out to be wrong, and now you have a terminal credibility problem even with people (like myself) who are already convinced that consumerist civilization is fundamentally incompatible with the survival of the natural world.

-The primary strategy for dealing with this credibility problem has been to demonize anyone who doesn't agree with you as a holocaust denier or a retarded cretin. That strategy only works within your own bobo in-group. When you tell someone outside of your in-group that they are a retard or a moral abomination, you are insulting them and making them into a bitter enemy. (Why is this so hard for Liberals to understand?)

-So please understand, that when you accuse someone of being a "Denialist" (or a cretin or a paid shill of big oil) because they have some skepticism about your latest doomsday theory, you are showing them the door. You can't build real political coalitions by driving people out.

Troy Jones said...

I have long felt a person will have much better luck changing the world with their example than with their opinion.

The pushback I seem to hear the most is that "there isn't time" to change people's thinking through positive examples that lead to voluntary, widespread adoption of more green-ish lifestyles. Instead, we are told, action must come primarily through legislation and regulation. The fact that the costs of said legislation and regulation burden developing countries (and the poor of this country) while not so much as even inconveniencing the affluent of this country is not something a polite person is supposed to notice. "Those people will just have to make do with less so I can maintain my opulent lifestyle." Yeah, I'm sure that attitude will change lots of hearts and minds.

If I say I believe my house is burning down and I will die if I don't leave the house right now, but then I sit down on the sofa and turn on the TV, apparently settling in for a night of brain-rotting boobtube, do I really believe my house is burning down? Lots of people wonder why "the right" simply does not believe the "consensus of experts" in regards to anthropogenic climate change. This is not too hard to figure out. They don't believe it because so many on "the left" plainly don't believe it either. Certainly Al Gore doesn't. Why should anyone take anything he says seriously?

Of course I know the messenger's character has nothing to do with the validity of the message, etc. At the same time, it is a natural human reaction to look at someone whose hypocrisy is in full view and say, "well, clearly he doesn't believe a word of that sermon he's preaching, so why should I?"

jim said...

John
Although I agree with all your points, I think the big reason we haven't solved the problem of climate change is that there is no energy source that has the same or better qualities than fossil fuels. The dense concentrated energy in fossil fuels is really hard to beat. And we have a huge sunk investment in fossil fuel infrastructure and technology.

As an aside, i am keeping tabs on high altitude wind power.
euanmearns.com/high-altitude-wind-power-reviewed/
If this technology pans out, it should have a very high EROEI more than 100.
But of course there is a limit on how much wind power you can extract before you start having climate impacts.

Bob Brown said...

Excellent post-mortem, the only thing I'd add is that I think desertification and deforestation are as much a contributor to climate change as green house gases (admittedly much of that is caused by machines spewing greenhouse gases).

I'm hoping we can reach the tipping point with permaculture. I've heard Geoff Lawton talks where he said in his research that it only requires 11-14% of people to adopt something for a movement to gain momentum and become the new normal. That offers people positive life improvements (food, quality of life etc.). As you point out offering better is the only way to get people to change the way they live.

Thanks,

Bob
http://investingwithnature.com/

Venkataraman Amarnath said...

There is at least one scientist who practices what he preaches. Check Peter Kalmus's Life with 1/10th the Fossil Fuel - Turns Out to Be Awesome at http://becycling.life/

[DrEvil]

^^Great piece, but one minor quibble: There was never a scientific consensus on a new Ice Age. It was very popular in the mainstream press, but the majority of actual science at the time pointed to warming.

As for being nice to the denier crowd - sure, if they have something smart to say, but when they just keep on trotting out the same old denier bullshit that's been debunked over and over and over again (the latest one being "They adjusted the temperatures!", never mind that they adjusted the temperatures down), then I say fuck 'em. They don't want to listen and they can all go jump off a cliff. It's like trying to discuss evolution with a young Earth creationist.

[Wombaticus Rex]

My problem with this situation is that the very persons that "pretend" to be concerned about climate change are also heavily invested in making sure it comes true. This involves everybody from the petro industry on down.

In the stock market it is called "selling short."

You should maybe hop on google and read up on what short selling actually is; that ain't it, in any context or flavor.

[Belligerent Savant]

As for being nice to the denier crowd - sure, if they have something smart to say, but when they just keep on trotting out the same old denier bullshit that's been debunked over and over and over again (the latest one being "They adjusted the temperatures!", never mind that they adjusted the temperatures down), then I say fuck 'em. They don't want to listen and they can all go jump off a cliff. It's like trying to discuss evolution with a young Earth creationist.

Indeed/Agreed.
My take on the gist of his (JMG's) comments: the movement itself simply hasn't been presented/marketed well to those that were/are open -- at least in part -- to the prospect of CHANGE. Optics, and the ability to pursuade large swaths of humans, are critical for any movement requiring mass buy-in (EDIT to add: as well as a moving-forward/long-term plan that offers a viable option for majority/"wage" class quality-of-life). Objective facts help, of course, but only as ONE part of a multi-layered successful campaign plan (though its import has lessened over the years with the rise of truthiness; any vague assembly of words that may offer a semblance of truth -- or simply enough 'truthy' words to keep the average human's short-attention span from bothering to fact-check -- will be enough to persuade many).
Certain groups/political entities have become experts in this tactic, as we have well-documented here.

There will always be a demographic that will simply disregard any attempts to affect change, however. The loyal stubborn brigade. They'll either be proven right or go down with the ship.

[fruhmenschen]

https://robertscribbler.com/2016/08/01/ ... te-change/

Ellicott City Flood — 1,000 Year Event Looks a Lot Like One of the Rain Bombs of Climate Change
We live in a strange new world, one in which the familiar is all mixed up with the radically altered. Such was the case this weekend when a weather pattern that was pretty normal for summer spawned a single thunderstorm that produced a once-in-a-thousand-years flood event in Ellicott City.

Normal Weekend, Typical Weather Pattern, Abnormal Conditions

On Saturday, my wife and I readied to trek out to Shenandoah National Park for a happily-anticipated summer camping trip. As we headed out the door, the weather pattern looked mostly normal for summer, if a little stormy. A high-pressure system out over the ocean was pulling in moisture off its waters and drawing warm air up from the south. A low over western Pennsylvania and a warm frontal boundary over Maryland created instability in a big zone of convection from Northern Virginia on through to Connecticut. Overall, it was a pretty typical pattern that would probably have produced some moderate-to-strong late-afternoon thunderstorms back in the 20th century. Back then, it was far less likely that a similar pattern would have produced a 1,000 year flood event.



(Extremely warm sea surface temperatures on the weekend of July 30-31 helped to fuel the record rainfall event over Elicott City, Maryland. Sea surface temperature anomaly map provided by: Earth Nullschool.)

However, conditions were not normal, not the same as they were back during a time when human fossil-fuel emissions hadn’t forced the world to warm by 1.2 degrees Celsius above 1880s levels. In the new world in 2016, the ocean high-pressure system was circulating over record warm sea surfaces that were 3-5 C hotter than late 20th-century averages. And because of this, the ocean was bleeding off a whole hell of a lot more moisture than it typically would. Any storms that fired in that very wet air mass would, as a result, tend to pump out a lot more rain than is typical.

A Wet Atmosphere Crackling with Unusual Energy

As my wife and I made our way toward the Blue Ridge Mountains and down Interstate 66 and Route 211, large, energetic cumulus clouds sprouted all around us. Wafted in the hot, unstable air, many tops punched up through the troposphere, spreading out into the characteristic anvil shapes of thunderstorms.

Light streamed down between these big, wet beasts. For a while, as we made our way up to the campground, set up our gear, and took a hike along a local rock scramble, we were fortunate — able to enjoy our day despite the loud rumbles and roars of thunder echoing up from the valleys or off the nearby mountainsides in the steamy, moisture-choked air.



(A massive amount of atmospheric moisture fueled powerful thunderstorms on Saturday, July 30 from the Appalachians of northwestern Virginia to the Baltimore City region. One of these storms dumped more than 4.5 inches of rain on Ellicott City, Maryland Saturday in just one hour. Image source: Terp Weather.)

At about 3,000 feet in elevation, these conditions were a bit odd for Shenandoah National Park which typically experiences milder weather. Temperatures were around 80 degrees Fahrenheit (about 5-6 F hotter than average), and the level of atmospheric moist

[Luther Blissett]

An epic Middle East heat wave could be global warming’s hellish curtain-raiser

BAGHDAD — Record-shattering temperatures this summer have scorched countries from Morocco to Saudi Arabia and beyond, as climate experts warn that the severe weather could be a harbinger of worse to come.

In coming decades, U.N. officials and climate scientists predict that the mushrooming populations of the Middle East and North Africa will face extreme water scarcity, temperatures almost too hot for human survival and other consequences of global warming.

If that happens, conflicts and refugee crises far greater than those now underway are probable, said Adel Abdellatif, a senior adviser at the U.N. Development Program’s Regional Bureau for Arab States who has worked on studies about the effect of climate change on the region.

“This incredible weather shows that climate change is already taking a toll now and that it is — by far — one of the biggest challenges ever faced by this region,” he said.

These countries have grappled with remarkably warm summers in recent years, but this year has been particularly brutal.

Parts of the United Arab Emirates and Iran experienced a heat index — a measurement that factors in humidity as well as temperature — that soared to 140 degrees in July, and Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, recorded an all-time high temperature of nearly 126 degrees. Southern Morocco’s relatively cooler climate suddenly sizzled last month, with temperatures surging to highs between 109 and 116 degrees. In May, record-breaking temperatures in Israel led to a surge in ­heat-related illnesses.

Temperatures in Kuwait and Iraq startled observers. On July 22, the mercury climbed to 129 degrees in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. A day earlier, it reached 129.2 in Mitribah, Kuwait. If confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization, the two temperatures would be the hottest ever recorded in the Eastern Hemisphere.

The bad news isn’t over, either. Iraq’s heat wave is expected to continue this week.

Stepping outside is like “walking into a fire,” said Zainab Guman, a 26-year-old university student who lives in Basra. “It’s like everything on your body — your skin, your eyes, your nose — starts to burn,” she said.

Guman has rarely left home during daylight hours since June, when temperatures started rising above 120 degrees and metal objects outside turned into searing-hot hazards.

About that time, Aymen Karim also began feeling trapped.

The 28-year-old engineer at a government-run oil company in Basra said employees were ordered to stay home for several days in the past month. He and his family try not to go outside before 7 p.m.

“We’re prisoners,” Karim said.

Bassem Antoine, an Iraqi economist, said the weather has inflicted serious damage to the country’s economy. He estimates that Iraq’s gross domestic product — about $230 billion annually — has probably contracted 10 to 20 percent during the summer heat.

Iraqi officials say scores of farmers across the country have been struggling with wilting crops, and general workforce productivity has decreased.

Hospitals, meanwhile, have seen an uptick in the number of people suffering from dehydration and heat exhaustion.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis displaced by battles between government forces and Islamic State militants have endured the heat in tents and other makeshift shelters. Humanitarian organizations have been unable to reach all of them because of budget constraints, restrictions by Iraq’s government and risks associated with operating in war zones.

“A lot of these people are probably dying, but it’s hard to know,” said an official at an aid organization who was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly and so spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In Baghdad, the capital, the temperature measured at the international airport has reached 109 degrees or higher nearly every day since June 19. The city has been 10 and even 20 degrees warmer than normal for this time of year.

The government has declared multiple mandatory official holidays because of the heat. When that happens, many public employees turn up to work anyway because of the air conditioning available at government offices.

Most Iraqi homes and businesses suffer daily power cuts for 12 hours or more, and most Iraqis — unlike their rich neighbors in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia — are too poor to afford 24-hour air conditioning anyway. Such a luxury requires paying expensive fees for gas-powered generators.

During daylight hours, Baghdad’s streets are empty, but some businesses remain open. It’s either sweat at work or starve at home, said Eissa Mohsen, who owns a fruit stand in the Karrada area of downtown Baghdad.

“Look over there! That’s an air-conditioning unit, but I can’t afford to pay the generator fees to run it,” he said at his shop on a recent day.

The immediate cause of all this misery is a stubborn ­high-pressure system, but a fundamental shift in the country’s weather patterns appears to be taking place, said Mahmoud ­Abdul-Latif, spokesman for Iraq’s meteorological department. In Baghdad, he said, the number of days with temperatures at 118 degrees or higher has more than doubled in recent years.

“If you look back 40 years ago, you’d have these temperatures for four or five days, but then the wind would kick up dust and that would cool the surface. That’s just not happening now,” he said.

Climate scientists say this shouldn’t be surprising.

A study published by the journal Nature Climate Change in October predicted that heat waves in parts of the Persian Gulf could threaten human survival toward the end of the century. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia recently predicted a similarly grim fate for the Middle East and North Africa, a vast area currently home to about a half-billion people.

The region’s governments are generally not prepared to deal with rapidly growing populations and climactic shifts, said Francesca de Châtel, an Amsterdam-based expert on Middle Eastern water issues. For years, she said, they have failed to address these problems adequately despite warnings from climate experts and U.N. agencies, and it may be too late now.

The United Nations predicts that the combined population of 22 Arab countries will grow from about 400 million to nearly 600 million by 2050. That would place tremendous stress on countries where climate scientists predict significantly lower rainfall and saltier groundwater from rising sea levels. Already, most countries in the region face acute water crises because of dry climates, surging consumption and wasteful agricultural practices.

Analysts point to inadequate government handling of an unprecedented drought in Syria as a trigger for the country’s devastating civil war, which has produced extraordinary refugee flows that have spilled into Europe.

Last year, Iraqis rallied in Baghdad against their government’s inability to provide enough electricity during another scorching summer heat wave. Little, if anything, resulted from those demonstrations. According to some estimates, Iraq’s population of about 33 million people will nearly double by 2050.

“The countries in the region are not prepared to cope with the effects of climate change,” said de Châtel.

Such a blistering future doesn’t seem like a far-off possibility to 33-year-old Arkan Farhan, who lives with his family near Baghdad in a tin hut at camp for people displaced by the Islamic State.

Last month, he said, he contracted typhoid from a communal water source that has become particularly crowded — and filthy — this summer. To cool off, his sons use it to fill a pan for bathing.

This month, his 69-year-old father, Jassam, was taken to the hospital after passing out from the heat.

“Fortunately, he was only bruised. He didn’t break any bones,” Farhan said of his father while sitting in his sweltering shack. “Iraqis are strong people. But this heat is like a fire. Can people live in fire?”

[fruhmenschen]

https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffM ... -from-2030
Blogs
Dr. Jeff Masters' Blog

Historic Flood Event in Louisiana From 20-30
By: Jeff Masters and Bob Henson , 5:31 PM GMT on August 14, 2016


A historic flooding event continues over southern Louisiana, where widespread rainfall amounts in excess of twenty inches since Friday have brought all ten river gauges on the Amite, Tickfaw, and Comite Rivers to record flood crests, flooded thousands of homes, and caused over 1,000 water rescues. The most extreme floods have occurred on the Amite River, which flows along the east side of the Baton Rouge metropolitan area. Flood waters stranded hundreds of cars on Interstate 12 just east of Baton Rouge for more than 24 hours, Saturday through Sunday. About 25 miles east-southeast of Baton Rouge, the flood crest on the Amite River appears likely to overtop the levee system built at Port Vincent after the destructive floods of April 1983 (at the tail end of the 1982-83 “super” El Niño). The flood control system was designed to handle a recurrence of the 14.6-foot crest observed in that record event. However, the Amite at Port Vincent had already reached 14.91 feet as of 9:15 am CDT Sunday, and it is projected to hit a crest of 16.5 feet early Monday, remaining above the previous record until Tuesday. Major flooding can be expected to the south of Port Vincent in southern parts of Ascension Parish, where voluntary evacuations are already in effect. “If you can get out, get out now,” said parish president Kenny Matassa on Sunday morning.


Figure 1. Major flooding in Prarieville, Louisiana on Friday, August 12, 2016. (@presleygroupmk/twitter.com) 


Figure 2. The Amite River at Denham Springs, just east of Baton Rouge, was at 46.2 feet on Sunday morning, August 14, 2016, nearly five feet above its previous record crest of 41.5 feet on March 8, 1983. Records there date back to at least 1921, making this an impressive feat. Today's crest is the only one of the river’s top 80 historic crests to occur during August, since the worst floods in the region are more commonly associated with winter and spring rainfall than with landfalling tropical cyclones. The Amite crested at 58.56 feet in Magnolia, Louisiana, topping the old record at that location by more than six feet set on April 23, 1977. Image credit: NOAA/NWS Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service.


Figure 3. Aerial view of flooding in Hammond, Louisiana on August 13, 2016. AP Photo/Max Becherer.

Some of the 24-hour rains that fell on Friday in Louisiana (ending at 11AM CDT/16UTC) had a recurrence interval at over 500 years, according to Metstat. Topping the list of phenomenal rainfall amounts catalogued by the NWS Weather Prediction Center for the period 6:00 am CDT Tuesday, August 9, 2016, through 9:00 am CDT Sunday was 31.39” near Watson, Louisiana. Other impressive amounts:

27.47”  Brownfields, LA
22.84”  Gloster, MS
14.43”  Panama City Beach, FL
8.97”  Fairhope, AL
8.11”  Williamsville, MO
7.90”  Cobden, IL


Figure 4. In a dramatic rescue on Saturday near Baton Rouge, a woman and her dog were pulled to safety just as their car went under water. See the powerful video here. Image credit: WAFB.

A tropical depression-like storm with tropical depression-like impacts
The storm system responsible for the record rains formed a distinct surface low just inland along the Alabama co

[stillrobertpaulsen]

McKibben: Time to Declare a War (Literally) on Climate Change

'It’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. And we are losing.'
by
Jon Queally, staff writer

Published on
Monday, August 15, 2016



We're under attack, says author and climate campaigner Bill McKibben, and the only way to defeat the enemy is to declare a global war against the destructive practices that threaten the world's imperiled ecosystems and human civilization as we know it.

In a new piece published Monday in The New Republic, the co-founder of the global climate action group 350.org says there is simply no more time to waste and that a full-scale mobilization, like the one orchestrated by the U.S. government during World War II, is now necessary if the adversary—human-caused global warming and the climate change that results—is to be vanquished.

"World War III is well and truly underway," writes McKibben. "And we are losing."

With the introductory paragraphs reading like a battlefield assessment in which melting ice sheets, firestorms and historic floods represent the movements of enemy forces, McKibben offers a rebuke to the inaction of world leaders who have refused to acknowledge the scale of the attack:

For years, our leaders chose to ignore the warnings of our best scientists and top military strategists. Global warming, they told us, was beginning a stealth campaign that would lay waste to vast stretches of the planet, uprooting and killing millions of innocent civilians. But instead of paying heed and taking obvious precautions, we chose to strengthen the enemy with our endless combustion; a billion explosions of a billion pistons inside a billion cylinders have fueled a global threat as lethal as the mushroom-shaped nuclear explosions we long feared. Carbon and methane now represent the deadliest enemy of all time, the first force fully capable of harrying, scattering, and impoverishing our entire civilization.

We’re used to war as metaphor: the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on cancer. Usually this is just a rhetorical device, a way of saying, “We need to focus our attention and marshal our forces to fix something we don’t like.” But this is no metaphor. By most of the ways we measure wars, climate change is the real deal: Carbon and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing havoc and panic, racking up casualties, and even destabilizing governments. (Over the past few years, record-setting droughts have helped undermine the brutal strongman of Syria and fuel the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria.) It’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. Its first victims, ironically, are those who have done the least to cause the crisis. But it’s a world war aimed at us all. And if we lose, we will be as decimated and helpless as the losers in every conflict--except that this time, there will be no winners, and no end to the planetwide occupation that follows.

Though McKibben has become known for marshaling his research and literary skills to inform and inspire the climate movement, he is not alone in pushing the theme of wartime mobilization.

In 2013, environmental journalist David Roberts, then writing for Grist, wrote how the metaphor of wartime mobilization "gets used a lot" but recognized it as an apt way to describe what will ultimately be necessary. More than three years later, following the Paris climate deal signed earlier this year and amid a torrent of increasingly ominous climate studies, the stakes are only that much higher.

"Language appears to be failing us," said Russell Greene, a DNC platform committee member and leading climate activist for the Progressive Democrats of America and People Demanding Action, last month. "What is urgent? When is immediately? We have lost touch. We are living in the age of consequences. We can no longer pretend otherwise. With our every action and non-action we leave our imprint on generations. There is no time left for gradualism. That window has passed. This is a climate emergency — the moment to make a stand for the future. For each other. For our children."

McKibben argues—despite the fossil fuel industry's orchestrated effort to suppress or dismiss the scientific consensus—that there is no longer room for denial or delay.

With an eye toward the U.S. presidential outcome this fall and an unknown congressional makeup for the next administration, McKibben laments the loss of Bernie Sanders in the primary, bemoans the prospect of President Donald Trump, and indicates how Hillary Clinton—though the likely winner—may not willingly embrace the profound counter-assault needed to fight the unrelenting physics of carbon, methane, and other greenhouse gases. He writes:

The next president doesn’t have to wait for a climate equivalent of Pearl Harbor to galvanize Congress. Much of what we need to do can—and must—be accomplished immediately, through the same use of executive action that FDR relied on to lay the groundwork for a wider mobilization. The president could immediately put a halt to drilling and mining on public lands and waters, which contain at least half of all the untapped carbon left in America. She could slow the build-out of the natural gas system simply by correcting the outmoded way the EPA calculates the warming effect of methane, just as Obama reined in coal-fired power plants. She could tell her various commissioners to put a stop to the federal practice of rubber-stamping new fossil fuel projects, rejecting those that would “significantly exacerbate” global warming. She could instruct every federal agency to buy all their power from green sources and rely exclusively on plug-in cars, creating new markets overnight. She could set a price on carbon for her agencies to follow internally, even without the congressional action that probably won’t be forthcoming. And just as FDR brought in experts from the private sector to plan for the defense build-out, she could get the blueprints for a full-scale climate mobilization in place even as she rallies the political will to make them plausible. Without the same urgency and foresight displayed by FDR—without immediate executive action—we will lose this war.

As with every war, notes McKibben, victory is not assured. "We’ve waited so long to fight back in this war that total victory is impossible, and total defeat can’t be ruled out."

But despite the enormous stakes and troubling odds, he continues, it is no longer an option to choose half measures against the enemy humanity now faces.

"The question is not, are we in a world war? The question is, will we fight back? And if we do, can we actually defeat an enemy as powerful and inexorable as the laws of physics?"

[Luther Blissett]

Thanks for that stillrobertpaulson. Here's a link to McKibben's original piece:

https://newrepublic.com/article/135684/ ... ilize-wwii

[PufPuf93]

'It’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. And we are losing.'

Humanity is not "losing"; humanity has lost and will adjust to a new and what was not so long ago not so abrupt trajectory less human friendly.

Change is real and profound. There is a human caused extinction event in progress.

In recorded human history environmental degradation has been adjusted to by migration and technology.

What is different now is that the degradation is cascading, global and attendant to the industrial revolution and rapid expansion of humanity allowed by the exploitation of fossil fuels, fossil soil, fossil water, and a rich web of life.

Human population is going to decline.

[Elihu]

: Time to Declare a War (Literally) on Climate Change

that hurts just to read that