Four disturbances in the Atlantic today! One is named Gabrielle.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/

Greenland has been found to have a long, deep canyon from its midsection to a huge fjord in northwestern Greenland. Such would be one of the huge channels through which the meltwater from the shrinking Greenland Ice Sheet would flow.

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/grand...eet-8C11034914

Rats! My disturbances are fizzling. But, I have hopes:

http://www.wunderground.com/MAR/

http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/Jef...?entrynum=2514

I think I know what happened to climate change discussion. They're calling the increasing hurricanes, droughts, etc. "extreme weather" and "freak storms" on the news now. All the ratings bumps from dramatic deaths, none of the calories!

The Kangaroos say there is no global warming!

http://www.news.com.au/technology/sc...-1226720375674

My hurricanes should be pulled over for DWI. Humberto is heading for the mid-ocean depths.

Well, we're up to the "H" storm.

My usual source on global warming is RealClimate, which has been unusually quiet the last several months. Silence broken. An recent article is titled Paleoclimate: The End of the Holocene. I should note that the Holocene is the last climate age, that the authors feel a new age of the world has begun.



The paper is a meta study. A whole bunch of people have written temperature studies covering the time since the last ice age ended. This paper references most to all of them, combing their results. As one might expect, since the last ice age, the temperature got warmer, then started getting cooler. The ice ages come and go primarily due to the Milankovitch Cycles. As the orbit of the Earth shifts slightly (much as a toy top will not spin steadily, but will cycle and wobble) more or less heat is absorbed into the atmosphere. If industrial processes had not put a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, we'd be about due to enter another ice age.

The short message of the paper is that 6000 years of the cooling one would expect given Milankovitch has been overwhelmed in a century or two. The pattern of ice ages coming and going with considerable regularity is clearly broken.

The result was published in Science. The RealClimate summary provides links to the details.

Emerging battery technology for energy storage.

Can Flow Batteries Replace Diesel Generators?


http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...sel-generators

…"Multiple battery technologies are being experimented with right now, including lithium and cadmium flow batteries, but Vancouver, British Columbia-based American Vanadium thinks vanadium flow batteries could have several distinct advantages, including durability and scalability.
The battery relies on an electrolyte compound made of a mixture of vanadium, a metal commonly used to harden steel, and sulfuric acid in a container that can continuously charge and discharge. Unlike most batteries, the electrolyte would not degrade over time because the anode and cathode aren't made out of competing material. And, since it's mostly made of water, it's nontoxic and can't explode, "...

Emerging technology

Nanocrystal Catalyst Transforms Impure Hydrogen into Electricity

http://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=11575
"The quest to harness hydrogen as the clean-burning fuel of the future demands the perfect catalysts—nanoscale machines that enhance chemical reactions. Scientists must tweak atomic structures to achieve an optimum balance of reactivity, durability, and industrial-scale synthesis. In an emerging catalysis frontier, scientists also seek nanoparticles tolerant to carbon monoxide, a poisoning impurity in hydrogen derived from natural gas. This impure fuel—40 percent less expensive than the pure hydrogen produced from water—remains largely untapped.
Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory—in research published online September 18, 2013 in the journal Nature Communications—have created a high-performing nanocatalyst that meets all these demands. The novel core-shell structure—ruthenium coated with platinum—resists damage from carbon monoxide as it drives the energetic reactions central to electric vehicle fuel cells and similar technologies."...

"Holocene" is the name of the interglacial that we have been living in. "Anthropocence" would be an extension of the interglacial caused by Global Warming, which is attributed to human activities.

""What is going on in Colorado is so ironic. Boulder is the headquarters of climate research, really for the whole world, The National Center for Atmospheric Research. A year ago it was evacuated because of fast-moving forest fires in the middle of this intense drought. This year it is evacuated because of the worst flooding. You can’t believe how off the charts that rainfall is. The volume of water is only possible because we’ve changed the atmosphere. Warm air holds more water vapor than cold. There are these tails of moisture coming up from the South in places where they have never been before. It is eerie to watch."


"We just can’t keep doing this. We have actually got to get a handle on global warming before this gets any further out of hand." ...... Bill McKibben

Originally Posted by TimWalker

"Holocene" is the name of the interglacial that we have been living in. "Anthropocence" would be an extension of the interglacial caused by Global Warming, which is attributed to human activities.

I generally don't bother to argue with terminology, but I'm not confident that what will happen could be viewed as just an extended interglacial. If we lose both ice caps, the change will have much more impact than an extended business as usual, and the global average temperature is getting real close to the point where the poles have melted in the past. Real close and climbing fast.

And it's not as if one can't clearly observe it already happening to the north.

Germany having trouble with its shift to renewables. I hope it turns out to be worth it.

Originally Posted by B Butler

I generally don't bother to argue with terminology, but I'm not confident that what will happen could be viewed as just an extended interglacial. If we lose both ice caps, the change will have much more impact than an extended business as usual, and the global average temperature is getting real close to the point where the poles have melted in the past. Real close and climbing fast.

And it's not as if one can't clearly observe it already happening to the north.

Of course the North and South poles are very different. It would take comparatively little increase in overall heating to melt the ice covering the Arctic Ocean. The North Polar areas get little heating in the late summer, but lengthen the season of open water and the intense heating of the polar North goes into warming the ocean instead of melting ice. Around the summer solstice the daily insolation is typical of the equatorial regions due to the constant sunlight. Open sea water has a very low albedo.

A seasonally-warm Arctic Ocean would have huge influence upon lands well to the south of the Arctic. One would be the transformation of tundra into forest because warmer summer temperatures would foster tree growth now precluded. The Greenland ice sheet is thermodynamically unstable, as it would not re-form if it disappeared.

The Antarctic, in contrast, is stable because strong ocean currents around 60S (there are no land masses at that latitude) effectively protect it from warm air masses that would significantly erode the ice sheet.

There is no global warming:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/opinio...html?hpt=hp_t4

There is no global warming:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/op...ores.html?_r=0

There is no global warming:

http://www.theguardian.com/environme...ate%20refugees

Bad Dog's selection of articles reflects a subjective trend in what I've been seeing in the main stream media. It seems harder to deny the sea level rise than the atmospheric temperature rise and shifting weather patterns. While the One Percent seems still to be blocking efforts to reduce carbon emissions, an awful lot of seaside communities, states and nations are in "it's real, what concrete plans do we have to make" mode. While not a lot is happening to avert the disaster, some at least are getting ready to deal with the disaster.

Originally Posted by B Butler

Bad Dog's selection of articles reflects a subjective trend in what I've been seeing in the main stream media. It seems harder to deny the sea level rise than the atmospheric temperature rise and shifting weather patterns. While the One Percent seems still to be blocking efforts to reduce carbon emissions, an awful lot of seaside communities, states and nations are in "it's real, what concrete plans do we have to make" mode. While not a lot is happening to avert the disaster, some at least are getting ready to deal with the disaster.

The One Percent believes itself exempt from consequences of its behavior because it has enough money with which to buy its way out of trouble. Others can drown, burn or suffocate in fires, die of battles in resource wars, and of course starve, but the elite will always have more assets. They are fools.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

The One Percent believes itself exempt from consequences of its behavior because it has enough money with which to buy its way out of trouble. Others can drown, burn or suffocate in fires, die of battles in resource wars, and of course starve, but the elite will always have more assets. They are fools.

Or are they correct? Will the currently empowered elites die before anything happens that they can't buy their way out of? The spirit might be familiar. "It will last my time. After me, the deluge."

Turning theory wise, I'm half convinced that global warming will not be seriously addressed during this crisis period, but will be obvious and clearly undeniable and disastrous about the time the next generation of prophets comes into their awakening. I was slightly underaged for participation in the 1960s Long Hot Summers, but had a decent look from the sidelines. As I've said before, while the younger generations disparage the Boomers, they don't begin to understand the intensity and emotion required to force Change on the Establishment. The next set of Long Hot Summers might be really something. If this crisis is stumbling along at a crawl, the next awakening could be a major explosion.

I'm not likely to survive to see it. The current millenials are apt to be generationally at ground zero. Somebody will have to be blamed.

Bad things could easily happen to the one percent, and to far more than the one percent.

Originally Posted by B Butler

Or are they correct? Will the currently empowered elites die before anything happens that they can't buy their way out of? The spirit might be familiar. "It will last my time. After me, the deluge."

That applies to matters other than global warming. The ultimate myopia remains solipsism, the delusion (among the stupid) or conceit (among the more sophisticated) that the only important reality is what they desire.

If anything the extreme consequences of global warming -- widespread crop failures and consequent famines, inundations of giant coastal cities and prime farmland, the rendering of fringe-temperate locations like Dallas and Athens into infernos, and cataclysmic wars, all without obvious techno-fixes or cheap reforms, are likely to be felt in the next Crisis Era. This time it is labor-management relations, or the Class Struggle between the Common Man and economic elites. But the real Crisis involving Global Warming is likely to strike with extreme vehemence around 2100, roughly 80 years after this one.

Turning theory wise, I'm half convinced that global warming will not be seriously addressed during this crisis period, but will be obvious and clearly undeniable and disastrous about the time the next generation of prophets comes into their awakening. I was slightly underaged for participation in the 1960s Long Hot Summers, but had a decent look from the sidelines. As I've said before, while the younger generations disparage the Boomers, they don't begin to understand the intensity and emotion required to force Change on the Establishment. The next set of Long Hot Summers might be really something. If this crisis is stumbling along at a crawl, the next awakening could be a major explosion.

The first solutions to Crisis difficulties are patchwork solutions and desperate, individual efforts of the Common Man to solve his own problems in his own narrow universe, which explains why many of the individual responses to the Great Depression were the formation of small businesses that filled unglamorous but vacant niches. As a rule the biggest and most pressing threats get the greatest attentions. The last Crisis resolved genocidal, fascist racism that sent the ashes of recently-living competitors of economic elites (Jews who were much of the European middle class before 1940) up chimneys. It did not solve Jim Crow racism that exploited people largely trained to accept their roles as impoverished toilers out of fear of a strictly-personal lynching. The Crisis of 1940 would resolve genocidal racism built upon resentments and myth; the subsequent Awakening of the 1960s and 1970s would question and challenge institutional racism. The ultimate solution to fascist racism that culminated in mass murder was military conquest, the definitive outer-world solution. The solution to the institutional racism that oppressed people in the American South was to change the minds of people.

I'm not likely to survive to see it. The current millennials are apt to be generationally at ground zero. Somebody will have to be blamed.

Having been born in 1955, whether I survive this Crisis is more likely a question of evading the ravages of age. Unless my life has some weird and unpredictable trajectory I will have an insignificant role in it.

Bad things could easily happen to the one percent, and to far more than the one percent.

Indeed. They are the ones most likely to be held culpable for anything that goes catastrophically wrong, followed by their enforcers and political stooges who get so hooked on individual privilege in a nasty order that gets toppled. The enforcers and stooges depend upon salaries and perhaps ongoing appropriations, and perhaps corruption for their highly-visible lives as parvenus in a rotten order. As the military officers and police officials who give the criminal orders to torture and murder anyone who protests they are obvious candidates for death sentences. They never have the means with which to emigrate, and they are the last to see the precariousness of their position -- after all, they see nothing wrong in what they are doing. Those stooges and enforcers are easily detected and caught, and their deeds are easily described with conventional depictions of such ordinary crime as "murder" and "theft". The 'one percent' usually can ship some gold and wire-transfer hard currency to safe havens and then take off, leaving behind their loyal enforcers to protect the formality of class privilege and the non-portable wealth.

Revolutions can go wrong and devour their own, too. Maybe it is best that the Revolution ends at the stage of retribution against brutal enforcers who are killers and thieves who would be executed for robbery-murders whose reward to the robber-murder is the remnants of a weekly paycheck of a workingman and at the dispossession of the people who made a mess of things for all but themselves before the Revolution.

What a surprise, the South and fascism turn up even in a discussion about Global Warming. Good job, PBrower.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

What a surprise, the South and fascism turn up even in a discussion about Global Warming. Good job, PBrower.

1. The only reference to the South was to a city on the fringe of the South -- Dallas -- a city with marked Western and Midwestern characteristics. I have seen Dallas described as "LA without the beach" for its culture, car-based way of life, and (in the 1980s) political conservatism. LA is definitely not a "Southern" city. It wouldn't take much warming to make Dallas a miserable place. In 1980, still the worst year for extreme temperatures in Dallas, I was making jokes about who I saw that day when temperatures were reaching 110F, including "Lee Harvey Oswald", "John Wilkes Booth", "Al Capone", "Benedict Arnold", "Vidkun Quisling", and -- on the day of record heat in which the temperature reached 113F, "Hideki Tojo". You can imagine what names I 'saved' for '114' and '115', which mercifully never came. How hot was it? I wore winter clothes for protection from the heat. Oh, did I sweat, and my dry-cleaning bills were horrendous, but I could have easily experienced worse. I got up to walk the dog at 5:30 AM.

I also mentioned Athens. Global warming could impose the sort of temperature regime that we now see in the Persian Gulf region and the coastal regions of Pakistan in the Mediterranean Basin. The word's highest temperature-humidity indices (THI) are now to be found in such places as Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Dharan (home of Aramco), and Karachi. Do you want those to appear in Barcelona, Florence, Rome, or Athens?

What likely happens in the southeastern quadrant of the United States is "no winter". The worst heat that one can experience is that for which one is unprepared, and you would be surprised how nasty 95F can be in February. That could be the norm in Dallas.

It's not the fault of the southeastern US or the Mediterranean Basin that the lives of so many people could get miserable in the wake of global warming. Before you say "Turn up the air conditioning" -- that is one huge use of energy which could only worsen the effect of global warming.


2. I was discussing the nature of Crisis Eras, and I predicted that the worst effects of global warming would not appear until about 85 years from now, likely in the next Crisis Era. In case you missed the essence of the Generational Theory, distinct cycles of history take about 80 years to complete with people doing things parallel in many ways every 80 or so years apart. Start with a Crisis Era in which much seems to need to be built anew or defended at consummate price after social rot takes its destructive course. Then in a High people seemed intent largely on feathering their nests and living comfortably with a great distrust for 'causes' because all adults remember how dangerous and unpleasant the Crisis Era was. Then in an Awakening some pampered youth who have never known a Crisis challenge the philosophical and religious assumptions behind a safe and dull post-Crisis order and seek to 'find themselves' -- while neglecting the children who are left to their own devices. As the challenges to the assumptions of life weaken, the kids who were left to their own devices while their mothers sought 'meaningful careers' and men reached for the physical or metaphorical stars appear as materialistic hedonists who suggest that "money makes the world go around" -- and people start looking out only for themselves and fall for scams. Economic activity often degenerates into fraud, mass media become intellectually empty, and education becomes nothing more than a means of entry to a Good Life to be had by denying the Good Life to others. Such degenerate behavior leads to a Crisis as institutions collapse.

You can trust that around 2080 people will be making money off the bad consequences of Global Warming -- perhaps even 'rescuing' peasants of India and China from inundated farmland only to sell them into slavery. Maybe around 2100 humanity will see Spartacus-like revolts in much of the world. That is one possibility for a nasty, world-wide 4T.

3. I assume no 'nobility' in human behavior. History has shown much of itself as an obscene tale written in the blood of innocent people. So it was in Europe and Asia in 1943; so it can be now; and so it can be in another 80 or so years. We could easily revert to the old Roman gladiatorial games and feeding social pariahs to predatory beasts as a crowd-pleasing spectacle. Maybe this time the predators are not the bears, tigers, and lions of Roman times on the sand-covered wooden floor of the Colosseum but instead sharks or crocodiles in a giant aquarium. But technical sophistication in barbarity makes the barbarity no less depraved. Instant replays and satellite broadcasts would make the feeding of a religious heretic or political offender to predatory beasts no less abominable than what the Romans did to Christians and uncontrollable slaves. Humanity slides back quickly to reptilian behavior when such is easy.

4. If I see any cure to evil it is to make cruelty unthinkable. Religion is not enough, as every religious heritage has found some pretext for cruelty toward its enemies. We need empathy to be decent people, which means that we must get sick to our stomachs when we notice cruelty. Then and only then can we see an end of crusades, jihad, pogroms, purges, and Holocausts. We destroy evil not so much by driving some evil leader to blow his brains out with a handgun but by making the thought processes that make a Hitler possible no longer possible.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

What a surprise, the South and fascism turn up even in a discussion about Global Warming. Good job, PBrower.

The South *is* an energy intensive place to live, and will be impacted fairly harshly by rising sea levels. So, hotter temps, weather extremes, and loss of wetlands, etc are going to hurt.