Amazingly, playdude is the only one who gets it.
But hey man, no making fun of my girl Kim! I wanna be just like her when I grow up.

Playdude,

Pouches? Really?

I don't need no stinking pouches.

My kids know where they can sit, high and dry.

Because they know -

This momma floats!

XXXOOO's

Kim

p.s. KS says bring over those new cigars!

The elites are plenty prepared for the coming storms -

In the event of a water landing, silicone breast implants may be used as a flotation device!

As casualties mount, scientists say global warming as been hugely underestimated.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/2...underestimated

Climate change is driving more extreme weather, according to this report:
http://www.climatecommunication.org/...ther/overview/

When it rains, it increasingly pours!


The map shows the percentage increases in very heavy precipitation (defined as the heaviest 1 percent of all events) from 1958 to 2007 for each region. There are clear trends toward more very heavy precipitation for the nation as a whole, and particularly in the Northeast and Midwest. Karl et al. 2009 - See more at: http://www.climatecommunication.org/....qyuIKWEi.dpuf

Drought increasing too:
http://www.climatecommunication.org/...ather/drought/

Is fracking more dangerous than coal? It seems so.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-br...tudy-1.1036352

Forget oil; we have a dangerous dependence on foreign chocolate!
http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/4/3/8/4383...f94b4e13a75670

Now this is a quite apt metaphor for the climate science deniers!

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...climate-denier

"The biggest tell of how he'll act in Congress may have come last summer, when the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East, a regional board established by the state after the Hurricane Katrina, announced it was planning on filing a lawsuit against 100 oil and gas companies. The board alleged that the companies' operations had increased flood-protection costs by eroding the coast. Graves' Master Plan itself contends that the state's never-ending network of canals and pipelines has taken "a toll on the landscape, weakening marshes and allowing salt water to spread higher into coastal basins."But Graves condemned the lawsuit immediately as little more than the work of a "greedy trial lawyer," and he joined with Jindal in a yearlong crusade to help kill it. Pro-lawsuit flood board members were replaced by the governor, and with Graves' support, the Legislature passed a bill last spring, written with the help of oil industry attorneys, that would retroactively prohibit flood boards from taking legal action. (The law, signed by Jindal, was declared unconstitutional by a judge last month and is heading to the state Supreme Court.)
Barring a spectacular upset, Graves will represent a kinder, fresher approach to climate issues than firebrands like Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), his former boss, who once dismissed climate science as "ridiculous pseudoscience garbage." Environmental groups have found a rare Republican they think is in their corner. So what happens when the congressman has to choose between Koch and coast? They'll find out soon enough."

The lower price of oil may soon make fracking uneconomical except for big companies, according to this report.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/11...alling-prices/

Now I wonder, what happens to fracking and gas prices when wind and solar energy and car batteries ramp up?

Progress of solar energy:

http://energy.gov/articles/progress-...across-america

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/defa...rgy_future.pdf

The nature of the opposition: "the cause of global warming is dinosaur flatulence." I know what that refers to (right-wing politicians' hot air).

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

The lower price of oil may soon make fracking uneconomical except for big companies, according to this report.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/11...alling-prices/

As of now, most frakking is already in the red:



Actually, this is nothing new. We'll just have yet another bust in the oil patch. I foresee a booming business for pawn shops, repo companies, and foreclosure attorneys. IOW, been there, done that.

Now I wonder, what happens to fracking and gas prices when wind and solar energy and car batteries ramp up?

Easy. I foresee a bunch of shut in wells. This again is nothing new. When a well is deemed to be never profitable, that is the procedure: plug and case, baby.

Originally Posted by Ragnarök_62

As of now, most frakking is already in the red:



Actually, this is nothing new. We'll just have yet another bust in the oil patch. I foresee a booming business for pawn shops, repo companies, and foreclosure attorneys. IOW, been there, done that.




Easy. I foresee a bunch of shut in wells. This again is nothing new. When a well is deemed to be never profitable, that is the procedure: plug and case, baby.

Okay then, Texas won't gain another 198 seats to gerrymander in Congress after 2020. It's about time the rest of us got some good news.

I expect rents in NW North Dakota to drop by a lot...

This is both interesting and scary-also, this is a topic that is new to me.

The changing width of Earth’s tropical belt

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip...entexpansion-1
…”A change in the latitudinal extent of the tropical belt can lead to substantial changes in local climate near its edges. The surface temperature gradient across latitudes is large near those edges, typically 1 K per degree latitude. So a shift of just 5° latitude in the tropical belt edge would lead to a local temperature change of about 5 K. Warming of that magnitude exceeds both the roughly 1-K average increase observed globally for the past century and the expected warming through the end of the 21st century. 7
Likewise, a shift in the pattern of evaporation and precipitation shown in figure 3 can dramatically change the local hydrological balance in the vicinity of the belt edges. Formerly humid areas may turn arid and vice versa. The changes would have major consequences for water availability for urban settlements, farming, ranching and herding, hydropower, and forestry. Natural ecosystems, including parklands, nature reserves, fisheries, and marine and estuarine ecosystems, are also sensitive to hydrological changes. Furthermore, an expansion of the tropical belt could lead to a poleward spread of vector-borne infectious diseases, such as malaria, dengue fever, and cholera.
A change in the latitudinal extent of the Hadley cells is likely to move the location of the subtropical jet streams and thus shift the boundary of the Ferrel cells, with likely shifts in midlatitude storm tracks. Consequent water-cycle changes could strain human and natural systems in those areas too.
Several recent studies offer evidence of a poleward expansion of the tropical belt. 8 , 9 Estimated rates of that expansion since the beginning of the satellite era in 1979 range from barely detectable (around 0.2° latitude per decade) to quite rapid (around 2° latitude per decade). That range spans an order of magnitude, though the expansion rate is sensitive to the metric used to measure it. 10Figure 5 , taken from the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, 7 summarizes the past 33-year movement of the northern and southern edges of the tropical belt. Some metrics, such as the mass transport along meridians, reveal a wide spread among different data sets and large year-to-year variability compared with the general trend. Much of that variability is due to natural climate fluctuations. For example, strong El Niño events and suspended aerosols in the stratosphere after large volcanic eruptions can narrow the tropical belt, while strong La Niña events widen it. 11”…

…’According to climate-model studies, a fraction of the small expansion is attributable to increased atmospheric greenhouse gases. However, although the basic thermodynamic effects of greenhouse- gas-induced climate change are simple—changes to the energy budget of the system produce changes in temperature—the response of the general circulation is much more complicated. That’s because the general circulation is shaped by the detailed nonlinear balance among the various components of the climate system, including ocean circulation; clouds; sea ice; and the transports of heat, angular momentum, and moisture. Yet it is the atmospheric circulation changes that may be most important to society, insofar as their shifts may have more dramatic consequences on the water cycle than global mean temperature changes. 14”…

Originally Posted by radind

This is both interesting and scary-also, this is a topic that is new to me.

New to me as well. I've long heard that while the global average temperature is apt to rise, the effect in any given area might not be as simple as as things being a bit warmer.

There is an ancient example that I've bumped into a few times, but I haven't studied in depth. Egypt's Old Kingdom ended with drought. Digging around Egypt you find a lot of Old Kingdom towns that were never rebuilt in subsequent eras. Well, you don't need to dig much. Satellite cameras and radar does most of the work. Anyway, the Nile floods became much less in the very long term. The New Kingdom never grew as populous as the Old Kingdom. It also wasn't just Egypt. There was a fairly strong empire where modern Turkey is. Where once food and labor was so plentiful that building huge monuments such as the pyramids made perfect sense -- some of the basic ideas behind the New Deal aren't very new at all -- in came desert and dust. The Middle East once had such a beneficial climate that human civilization got a head start there, but it changed and hasn't changed back in millennia.

Major climate change in the ancient world was kinda unexpected when the diggers in the Egyptian desert first proposed the theory. Much skepticism. They ended up drilling deep sea dirt core samples downwind of Egypt and Turkey to confirm a boundary between little desert sand blowing out to sea and a lot of desert sand blowing out to sea at about the right time frame.

Anyway, I don't know this in depth. A PBS special just caught my interest one night. Still, it reinforced my feelings about large, sudden and long term climate change. Our time is not unique.

Originally Posted by B Butler

New to me as well. I've long heard that while the global average temperature is apt to rise, the effect in any given area might not be as simple as as things being a bit warmer.

There is an ancient example that I've bumped into a few times, but I haven't studied in depth. Egypt's Old Kingdom ended with drought. Digging around Egypt you find a lot of Old Kingdom towns that were never rebuilt in subsequent eras. Well, you don't need to dig much. Satellite cameras and radar does most of the work. Anyway, the Nile floods became much less in the very long term. The New Kingdom never grew as populous as the Old Kingdom. It also wasn't just Egypt. There was a fairly strong empire where modern Turkey is. Where once food and labor was so plentiful that building huge monuments such as the pyramids made perfect sense -- some of the basic ideas behind the New Deal aren't very new at all -- in came desert and dust. The Middle East once had such a beneficial climate that human civilization got a head start there, but it changed and hasn't changed back in millennia.

Major climate change in the ancient world was kinda unexpected when the diggers in the Egyptian desert first proposed the theory. Much skepticism. They ended up drilling deep sea dirt core samples downwind of Egypt and Turkey to confirm a boundary between little desert sand blowing out to sea and a lot of desert sand blowing out to sea at about the right time frame.

Anyway, I don't know this in depth. A PBS special just caught my interest one night. Still, it reinforced my feelings about large, sudden and long term climate change. Our time is not unique.

Not too long ago I heard that 2014 may go down as one of the warmest years on record. But here in the Midwest temps have averaged well below normal, and it was one of the ten coldest Novembers here around Chicago.

Originally Posted by Brian Beecher

Not too long ago I heard that 2014 may go down as one of the warmest years on record. But here in the Midwest temps have averaged well below normal, and it was one of the ten coldest Novembers here around Chicago.

I have noticed a tendency for earlier but shorter winters in southern Michigan. But whether such a pattern is significant and telling is a different matter altogether.

This is a fun little summary of hydrogen fuel cell cars.



Posted in the climate change discussion group on facebook, which is severely overpopulated with trollish deniers, but still has some good info.

Extensive lecture on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or0Os9RgPxo

I like the lively little number "Highfly" in the background of the video. I could post this in the Great Music of the 2T thread. It's by John Miles, a UK boomer (my cohort) that I've never heard of, and this song was his first release and made #17 on the UK charts. He had more hits and albums. He sounds like Jon Anderson, and he did some work with Alan Parsons and others. I found the song on a service that I don't think I want to download, but here's a bio:
http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.n...256E72000DED00

If I find a good postable video of it I'll post it in the other thread.

Caution flag.

Natural gas: The fracking fallacy
The United States is banking on decades of abundant natural gas to power its economic resurgence. That may be wishful thinking.

http://www.nature.com/news/natural-g...allacy-1.16430

…”Companies are betting big on forecasts of cheap, plentiful natural gas. Over the next 20 years, US industry and electricity producers are expected to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new plants that rely on natural gas. And billions more dollars are pouring into the construction of export facilities that will enable the United States to ship liquefied natural gas to Europe, Asia and South America.
All of those investments are based on the expectation that US gas production will climb for decades, in line with the official forecasts by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). As agency director Adam Sieminski put it last year: “For natural gas, the EIA has no doubt at all that production can continue to grow all the way out to 2040.”

But a careful examination of the assumptions behind such bullish forecasts suggests that they may be overly optimistic, in part because the government's predictions rely on coarse-grained studies of major shale formations, or plays. Now, researchers are analysing those formations in much greater detail and are issuing more-conservative forecasts. They calculate that such formations have relatively small 'sweet spots' where it will be profitable to extract gas.

The results are “bad news”, says Tad Patzek, head of the University of Texas at Austin's department of petroleum and geosystems engineering, and a member of the team that is conducting the in-depth analyses. With companies trying to extract shale gas as fast as possible and export significant quantities, he argues, “we’re setting ourselves up for a major fiasco”. "

A related issue.

Climate change: Protect the world’s deltas
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-c...TWT_NatureNews
…”The window to stabilize the world's deltas is closing fast. By 2100, land losses from rising sea levels alone could reach 5% for higher deltas such as the Krishna–Godavari or the Ganges–Brahmaputra, 30% for the Mekong, Nile and Yellow, and more than 80% for the lower Danube delta. And the sea will keep rising for centuries even if global warming is stemmed and sediment flow to deltas is restored. Restoration schemes must be bigger, faster and better. They must include all deltas, respond to the rapid pace of environmental and economic change, and support data collection, modelling and real-time monitoring.”…

Originally Posted by radind

Caution flag.

Thanks for the info. Another "bubble" in the making.

And in the short term, switching to natural gas from shale extracted through fracking is a net zero or worse for global warming.

Some very creative scientists at work.

Coating Reflects Sunlight, Radiates Heat to Cool Buildings


http://www.photonics.com/Article.asp...eklyNewsletter

…”Developed by a team at Stanford University, the 1.8-µm-thick photonic radiative cooling film is made of seven layers of silicon dioxide and hafnium oxide on top of a thin layer of silver.

The coating is a highly efficient mirror, preventing 97 percent of sunlight from striking the building and heating it up. It is also tuned to radiate at an IR frequency that can pass through the atmosphere without warming the air.

“Every object that produces heat has to dump that heat into a heat sink,” said professor Dr. Shanhui Fan. “What we’ve done is to create a way that should allow us to use the coldness of the universe as a heat sink during the day.” “…

Pretty cool. But it would take a shitload of Ag and Hf ...

RealClimate's most recent article addresses the skeptic / media talking point that global warming has paused since the record warm 1998. "Recent global warming trends: significant or paused or what?"

It looks like 2014 might be as warm or warmer than 1998, which breaks the meme. More importantly, the data is examined with a brief review of statistics. When can a trend be considered statistically significant? The short answer is that you need more samples to get significance, and since 1998 isn't a long enough sample size to give significance.

I have also mentioned in many prior notes the solar cycles and how we're approach a peak solar intensity. While the solar cycles aren't the only cause of temperature variation, they do show up relatively cleanly in the graphs presented.