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You do know that I was thinking specifically of you when I wrote "deluded, drug addled hippie", didn't you?Originally Posted by Eric the Green
Sorry, but your Pollyanna vision for the future is impossible since human nature precludes it.
Human Nature DOES NOT CHANGE and CANNOT BE CHANGED.
Part of a study of human nature shows that people will always organize themselves into hierarchies and the most
ruthless will rule the earth with fear and violence.
The only thing that civilization can do is to try to hold back the worst excesses, but people will always be trying to
get a leg up on others - you can never change that. Your nanny state government proposals have been tried (i.e. Soviet
Union) - read "Animal Farm" to see what happens in that case. You need people in charge and they will always revert
to the same oppression that they claimed to fight against in the "revolution". Eternal vigilance (and a well armed populace)
is the cure for that - you can't let these people (Connie, the UN, etc) have an inch or else you lose your freedom.
The only way to create prosperity is free market capitalism. It forces us to compete and drives out the best
performance in humanity, in terms of what we can accomplish.
Your direction will lead to what Greece (and Europe) have become - a wasteland of screaming blobs of protoplasm (to
quote Newt) demanding their welfare checks and producing little value for society.
Sorry, many real Americans like myself and others who follow in the footsteps of the Founding Fathers wont let that happen.
Oh, in spite of your pipe-dream wishes, a large number of young people are starting to get it as well.
Global Warming is a fraud, perpetrated by those seeking to use fear to gain power. Our Founding Fathers warned us
against this kind of thing and charged us (the future generations) with defending The Republic (and the world - since USA
is the world's last best hope for and greatest example to) against this kind of demagougery.
I was hoping
A hippie is a great model to live up to. Unfortunately, as I mentioned on the other thread, drugs did not agree with me much, so I only sampled and did not addle. BUT, you said "many" on this forum are hippies. So, who else did you mean?
But there are other parts of human nature that indicate the opposite. We hippies are optimists.Sorry, but your Pollyanna vision for the future is impossible since human nature precludes it.
Human Nature DOES NOT CHANGE and CANNOT BE CHANGED.
Part of a study of human nature shows that people will always organize themselves into hierarchies and the most ruthless will rule the earth with fear and violence.
There's truth in what you say (although I never admired the Soviet Union or their policies), but the very fact that people tend to oppress others is why we need that "nanny state" government and the law to restrain them. You want to have it both ways: liberty for your oppressive capitalist goons, but not for Connie, the UN, etc,)The only thing that civilization can do is to try to hold back the worst excesses, but people will always be trying to get a leg up on others - you can never change that. Your nanny state government proposals have been tried (i.e. Soviet Union) - read "Animal Farm" to see what happens in that case. You need people in charge and they will always revert to the same oppression that they claimed to fight against in the "revolution". Eternal vigilance (and a well armed populace) is the cure for that - you can't let these people (Connie, the UN, etc) have an inch or else you lose your freedom.
Free market economies don't exist, for the very reason you mentioned. Businessmen try to get a leg up on others. A few end up dominating the market and driving others out. They are likely to oppose regulations to protect people, because they want maximum advantage and profit for themselves.The only way to create prosperity is free market capitalism. It forces us to compete and drives out the best performance in humanity, in terms of what we can accomplish.
No, young people are waking up to the hoax of free market economics. Europe IS more advanced than America, and America needs to be more like Scandinavia, where the people are happy. The problem with Greece is more-likely the result of the failure to charge and collect taxes on the wealthy.Your direction will lead to what Greece (and Europe) have become - a wasteland of screaming blobs of protoplasm (to quote Newt) demanding their welfare checks and producing little value for society.
Sorry, many real Americans like myself and others who follow in the footsteps of the Founding Fathers wont let that happen.
Oh, in spite of your pipe-dream wishes, a large number of young people are starting to get it as well.
Global warming denial is a fraud, perpetrated by those seeking to use fear to gain power. They want to have more power to wreck the environment so that they can maximize profit. The USA was originally the birthplace of the environmental movement in the sixties, and it needs to get back into the lead again, and it will, once you free-marketeers are driven out of the halls of power by concerned and informed young people.Global Warming is a fraud, perpetrated by those seeking to use fear to gain power. Our Founding Fathers warned us against this kind of thing and charged us (the future generations) with defending The Republic (and the world - since USA is the world's last best hope for and greatest example to) against this kind of demagougery.
I always want the AGW deniers to address the other, more "traditional" problems that fossil fuels create. Even if you don't think that AGW is happening, there are still many good reasons to stop using fossil fuels ASAP.
http://www.realclearenergy.org/artic...ny_108594.html
If you try to read about what’s going on with Germany’s Energiewende, it sometimes seems as if you’re reading about two different countries.
Read the report from Greenpeace, for instance, and the headline says “Germany’s Energy Revolution Goes from Strength to Strength.” If you go over to The Daily Caller, on the other hand, the headline is “Germany’s on the Brink of an Energy Crisis.”
Most articles will tell you that Germans are paying a higher price for electricity than anyone else in the world – three times the rate of the United States. Yet other articles will tell you that solar and wind energy are now so cheap that they’re driving coal and gas plants out of business.
Finally, if you read Jim Conca in Forbes, he will tell you that Germany is importing 61 percent of its energy. But any number of other articles say that Germany is Europe’s largest energy exporter...
-That's not what the article said. It said, that despite that, we could be looking at an Ice Age.
...a faulty premise right from the top. Where and when does the author think this "cut" happened?
http://www.geohive.com/charts/ag_crops.aspx
...there's no overall total, and the categories are numerous, but a quick look at the big three (Maize, Rice, and Wheat) shows a constant increase in production since 1970. So do Potatoes and Soybeans. There has been a terrifying drop in Agave fibre production, however!
If you can find the metric tonnage of production for fish, meat, and dairy, I'd appreciate it. I don't think it'll be much different, though. Anyway, if the author's thesis were correct, and considering that the late 1970s was something of a Little Ice Age, there would be a drop in crop production from 1980. Obviously there isn't.
If the climate were to warm, that would open up large chunks of the world to farming and grazing, and extend growing seasons in alreay existing areas.
-Outstanding! Then we can forget all this socialist crap and figure out how to adapt to our new climate and even exploit the changes! Since socialism sucks at adapting to changing conditions, you'll be happy to liberate the market! Welcome aboard, Eric!
I'll start by growing red bell peppers year round!
...Every decade since 1979, between 173,000 and 196,000 square miles of ice have disappeared...[/QUOTE]
-Oh, for cryin' out loud. 1979 is a cherry-pick date, the end of a little ice age; of course the temperature has warmed since then.
Here's another chart:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/20...nimum-reached/
On September 17, Arctic sea ice reached its likely minimum extent for 2014. This is now the sixth lowest extent in the satellite record and reinforces the long-term downward trend in Arctic ice extent... On September 17, 2014, sea ice extent dropped to 5.02 million square kilometers (1.94 million square miles)...
YEAR MINIMUM ICE EXTENT DATE IN MILLIONS OF SQUARE KILOMETERS IN MILLIONS OF SQUARE MILES 2007 4.17 1.61 September 18 2008 4.59 1.77 September 20 2009 5.13 1.98 September 13 2010 4.63 1.79 September 21 2011 4.33 1.67 September 11 2012 3.41 1.32 September 16 2013 5.10 1.97 September 13 2014 5.02 1.94 September 17 1979 to 2000 average 6.70 2.59 September 13 1981 to 2010 average 6.22 2.40 September 15
...and you'll notice that:
1) At no point do they note that 1979 (when the first satellite's came on line) was the climax of a little ice age;
2) The ice extent grew in 2013 and 2014.
Sheesh.
-Not really, because the good reasons to continue using them are obvious to anyone who lives on Planet Earth. See the article at the top.
-Ah. An subtle ad hominem.
You had the time to reply to that post, but not to this, I see:
On the premise that nonone argues that an ice age would NOT be good for food production, and the idea that a warmer climate scares you so many of you:
In which year do you think the world had the best climate? i.e., the Goldilocks climate?
Voters in the key swing states of Colorado, Iowa and Virginia overwhelmingly agree with Pope Francis' calls to do more to address climate change, a new poll has found.
According to a Quinnipiac University poll conducted July 9–20, voters by margins of 2-1 say climate change is caused by human activity:
In Colorado, 62 percent of voters agree with Pope Francis' call for action on climate change, compared to 31 percent who disagree.
In Iowa, 65 percent of voters back the Pope's call on climate change, compared to 25 percent who don't.
In Virginia, 64 percent of voters agree with Pope Francis' call for climate change, compared to 27 percent who disagree.
In all three states, agreement is strongest among Democrats.
Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/pol...#ixzz3gjIEjwwn
I guess people who live in Florida are going to have to get in shape like these guys, and spend their lives out in the sea.
The science: University of St. Thomas School of Engineering thermal and fluid sciences expert John P. Abraham told Mic that Hansen's study, which combines paleoclimatic and contemporary data with computer models, found "dramatic ice loss from Antarctica can occur very quickly by complex processes. For instance, warming of ocean waters near the ice sheet can cause dramatic losses in the ice which then melts and flows into the oceans. So, in a certain sense, this is melting from below, rather than melting from above."
The paper argues the rate of ice loss from West Antarctica may double about a decade from now. According to Hansen, linear estimates of rising sea levels, such as the consensus viewpoint reached by the IPCC, are much too conservative, and Earth's denizens could be dealing with 10-foot sea level rise within the next 50 to 200 years. As such, the paper concludes the 2 degrees Celsius warming limit recommended by the IPCC is "highly dangerous."
"We conclude that continued high emissions will make multi-meter sea level rise practically unavoidable and likely to occur this century," Hansen writes in his paper. "It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization."
http://mic.com/articles/122701/damni...-just-50-years
A 10'/3 meter rise in MSL would be devastating.
But institutions and even conventions of morality can change. Examples: slavery and military aggression used to be widely tolerated. The Nuremberg trials establish that both military aggression and slavery are no longer acceptable as normal behavior.
All sorts of governments bear watching, no matter what ideological dress the governments take. That includes pure plutocracies.Part of a study of human nature shows that people will always organize themselves into hierarchies and the most ruthless will rule the earth with fear and violence.
The only thing that civilization can do is to try to hold back the worst excesses, but people will always be trying to get a leg up on others - you can never change that. Your nanny state government proposals have been tried (i.e. Soviet Union) - read "Animal Farm" to see what happens in that case. You need people in charge and they will always revert to the same oppression that they claimed to fight against in the "revolution". Eternal vigilance (and a well armed populace) is the cure for that - you can't let these people (Connie, the UN, etc) have an inch or else you lose your freedom.
The Soviet Union was no nanny state. It was state serfdom.
There used to be a free market in slaves.The only way to create prosperity is free market capitalism. It forces us to compete and drives out the best performance in humanity, in terms of what we can accomplish.
So far I have associated the most complete subservience of government to the interests of property-owners with the degradation of freedom. Bringing out the best? Tycoons, corporate bureaucrats, and political hucksters invariably seek the ruin of all others -- and support an ideology that destroys a free market in favor of crony capitalism.
Capitalist productivity requires more investment in people and infrastructure, often through the government. Free markets of one time decided that children of the working poor would be obliged to quit school early and toil in mines and mills. But even capitalist productivity has its limits.Your direction will lead to what Greece (and Europe) have become - a wasteland of screaming blobs of protoplasm (to quote Newt) demanding their welfare checks and producing little value for society.
Newt (Gingrich?) is far from an admirable person.
The Founding Fathers never addressed modern economics; anyone who expects to draw economic or technological wisdom from people who lived in pre-industrial times introduces an anachronism.Sorry, many real Americans like myself and others who follow in the footsteps of the Founding Fathers won't let that happen.
Objective science is far more reliable than corporate power associated with interests that support eternally-rising consumption of limited resources.Global Warming is a fraud, perpetrated by those seeking to use fear to gain power.
They also warned us to leave slavery alone.Our Founding Fathers warned us against this kind of thing and charged us (the future generations) with defending The Republic (and the world - since USAis the world's last best hope for and greatest example to) against this kind of demagoguery.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Free Market Capitalism a cornerstone of civilization?
But human cultures can and do change. I am interested in the Fourth Turning theory as it provides a structure for how cultures change. It might be typical in any crisis that the conservatives mistake their culture for human nature, fixed and unchangeable. Progressives will see flaws in a culture that can be fixed.
As an example, I'll print a paragraph of the Corner Stone speech, given by Alexander H. Stephens shortly before he became vice president of the Confederacy.
This isn't to say that humans are a blank slate, that there is no human nature. However, I would be dubious about declaring an unchangeable aspect of human nature that one can't find in other social hunter-gatherer species. Territory, dominance, aggression, the male-female bond, the tribal bond and similar basic behaviors are not apt to go away short of big time genetic engineering.Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.
But free market capitalism isn't on that list. I know of no species other than humans that have been exemplars of free market capitalism. Thus, I sincerely doubt it is written in our genes.
Now if you want to argue that free market capitalism has produced very successful economies, that's another argument. However, you'd be open to the counter argument that the well regulated and heavily taxed economies of the tax and spend liberal era were among the most successful of all.
In the long run, if you say human nature doesn't ever change, you are denying evolution; right?
I'm not sure where takascar2 is on that subject.
And epigenetics as well as other views on the subject increase the possibility of faster genetic change.
Tangent Questions?
Evolution is real, it does in principle allow for changes in 'human nature', in genetically set behavior patterns. However, I would consider the time scale for behavioral evolution to be so slow as to not really interact with cultural change at the crisis by crisis level.
In climate change, the movements of continents do effect climate, but the continents are moving so slowly as to not be a factor in the current global warming crisis. In the same way, I don't see shifts in human genetic code are apt to be a factor in how free market capitalism develops over the next few crises. I suppose if there are genes which tend to make one a free market capitalist, and a lot of people with those genes are lined up against a wall and shot, it could happen. I don't really see it, though. Feel free to make a case.
Is there a particular behavior that you believe genetic that you think is likely to get bred out of the population quickly?
This is a possibility, but it does not to me seem likely to effect things in the upcoming crisis. If you disagree, feel free to give examples of what might happen. I can see a crisis coming as the wealthy and / or the government want to genetically enhance humans along various lines. It might even be the crisis after this one, assuming there is a regeneracy in the near future, which doesn't seem certain. The technology will be there in the not too distant future. However, I haven't really thought through how that might play out. My crystal ball doesn't see that far over the horizon.
Just one man's opinion, but may well be worth reading. I agree with his prediction.
http://paulgilding.com/2015/07/13/do...fossil-fooled/
I apologize for boring regular readers of this Forum. But the glaciers and ice shelves are getting smaller, especially in polar areas.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b06363d5a2a494The world's glaciers have melted to the lowest levels since record-keeping began more than 120 years ago, according to a study conducted by the World Glacier Monitoring Service that was released on Monday.
The research, published in the Journal of Glaciology, provides new evidence that climate change has spurred the rapid decline of thousands of the world's ice shelves over the past century. The first decade of the 21st century saw the fastest loss of ice since scientists began tracking it in 1894 -- and perhaps in recorded history, WGMS reported.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
http://www.realclearenergy.org/artic...es_108616.html
When the Green Mountain power company, Vermont’s largest utility, announced earlier this year it will be buying nuclear power from New Hampshire’s Seabrook reactor, many environmentalists felt betrayed.
“This is exactly why we closed Vermont Yankee, because we didn’t want any nuclear power,” they complained. But consumer demands left Green Mountain with no other choice. Nuclear is the ultimate reliable source of power... and Green Mountain needs back-up in case other sources stop working or if demand exceeds supply on a hot summer day...
Along with the shuttering of the state’s largest generating station came dreams of windmills, solar collectors, and other “clean and green” options that would soon be taking its place. Like many other states and nations, Vermont has assumed that passing laws mandating renewable energy quotas will solve the problem...
But like most other players, the Green Mountain State is finding that those goals must be tempered and sometimes outright abandoned. To date the most widespread initiative for switching to renewable energy has been importing hydropower from Quebec. The Canadians are proposing two cables that will run beneath Lake Champlain, one to southern New England and the other to New York City. Burlington and other Vermont cities would probably feed off of this.
Other attempts to go green have met with indifferent success. Several proposals to put windmills atop the Green Mountains – the obvious place for them – have been shouted down or stalled by local objections...
Burlington claims to be the first city in the country to have achieved 100 percent renewable status, although these claims are open to debate...
Ironically, while some environmentalists have been developing small dams, others have been campaigning to tear down small dams around the state... The strategy resembles one pursued for years by the Sierra Club, which favors small dams globally but campaigns to tear them down locally...
...Vermont is finding - like California and Germany before it – that the fastest way to a clean energy future is to close down local sources of power and import it from other regions. California gets more than half its energy from neighboring Arizona, Nevada and Washington State, the largest import energy bill in the nation. Both New York and New England are looking to Quebec hydro for future clean power...
-Actually, it was. Cradle to grave.
-You're obviously missing the libertarian argument that slavery is a rather obvious violation of freedom.
-Actually, that was the parents' decision.
-You avoided Taskar's point with an ad hominem.
-The basic principles of economics is no dependent on the eccentricties of a particular technology than the priniples of war, human beings are.
-No they didn't:
1) Slavery abolished in MA (1780);
2) Slavery gradually abolished in PA (1781);
3) Abolition of importation of slaves authorized (1787, actualized 1808);
4) Slavery abolished in the Northwest Territories (1789).
Burlington VT runs on 100% renewable energy, but that still includes some wood burning (that emits some pollution) and water power.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/vermo...ewable-energy/
Vermont energy policy:
http://www.acore.org/files/pdfs/states/Vermont.pdf
Wood burning controversy report:
http://america.aljazeera.com/article...ass-power.html
Last edited by Eric the Green; 08-05-2015 at 01:27 AM.
The poor suffer the most from human-caused, libertarian climate change:
http://www.theguardian.com/environme...most-un-report
Yes, I said "libertarian" again.
All of our actions have an impact on the world. We can't escape some level of responsibility, even if it's only a drop in the bucket. And we could have more impact than we might think.
Dr. Moron The Rani upbraided me for saying people are responsible for the effects that their opinions and policies have. It's true, I do think we have a responsibility.
Personal actions and political actions, are alike personal actions.
If you defend a belief that the government should not exercize any control, funding or direction on the grounds that this is "use of force," then you are contributing to climate change by opposing the necessary government action.
If you attempt to defend this belief by denying that climate change and global warming are happening, or that it is caused by our use of fossil fuels, then you are contributing to climate change by opposing the necessary government action.
The responsible thing is to support and vote for government policies that will regulate and/or tax carbon pollution and encourage solar and wind power. And to pressure politicians to act.
Personal actions are important too. Are you vegetarian or vegan? That helps. Are you getting solar energy put on your roof? Will you get an electric car? Do you ride your bike? Is your car fuel efficient? Did you change to flourescent or LED lighting in your house? Are you using less or no air conditioning or heating? Etc.?
We all need to do our part.
The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here
The worst predicted impacts of climate change are starting to happen — and much faster than climate scientists expected
BY ERIC HOLTHAUS August 5, 2015
Walruses, like these in Alaska, are being forced ashore in record numbers. Corey Accardo/NOAA/AP
Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.
On July 20th, James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist who brought climate change to the public's attention in the summer of 1988, issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065. The authors included this chilling warning: If emissions aren't cut, "We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea-level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization."
Eric Rignot, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of California-Irvine and a co-author on Hansen's study, said their new research doesn't necessarily change the worst-case scenario on sea-level rise, it just makes it much more pressing to think about and discuss, especially among world leaders. In particular, says Rignot, the new research shows a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperature — the previously agreed upon "safe" level of climate change — "would be a catastrophe for sea-level rise."
Hansen's new study also shows how complicated and unpredictable climate change can be. Even as global ocean temperatures rise to their highest levels in recorded history, some parts of the ocean, near where ice is melting exceptionally fast, are actually cooling, slowing ocean circulation currents and sending weather patterns into a frenzy. Sure enough, a persistently cold patch of ocean is starting to show up just south of Greenland, exactly where previous experimental predictions of a sudden surge of freshwater from melting ice expected it to be. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, recently said of the unexpectedly sudden Atlantic slowdown, "This is yet another example of where observations suggest that climate model predictions may be too conservative when it comes to the pace at which certain aspects of climate change are proceeding."
Since storm systems and jet streams in the United States and Europe partially draw their energy from the difference in ocean temperatures, the implication of one patch of ocean cooling while the rest of the ocean warms is profound. Storms will get stronger, and sea-level rise will accelerate. Scientists like Hansen only expect extreme weather to get worse in the years to come, though Mann said it was still "unclear" whether recent severe winters on the East Coast are connected to the phenomenon.
And yet, these aren't even the most disturbing changes happening to the Earth's biosphere that climate scientists are discovering this year. For that, you have to look not at the rising sea levels but to what is actually happening within the oceans themselves.
Water temperatures this year in the North Pacific have never been this high for this long over such a large area — and it is already having a profound effect on marine life.......
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...#ixzz3i3Z4jwbU
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
Human–Climate Link Still 97%? Nope. Over 99%. (VIDEO)
July 31st, 2015 by Sandy Dechert
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/07/31/...nope-99-video/
James L. Powell, director of the National Physical Sciences Consortium and whistleblower on climate change denial, has a mission to bring media and readers up to date on how many scientists believe people cause climate change. The anthropogenic climate change number is larger than you might think.
Dr. Powell has examined titles and abstracts of more than 24,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles on climate change published during the past couple of years. He has identified 69,406 authors named in the articles. Only four of them (one in every 17,352 scientists) rejected the fact that human emissions cause climate change. He refers back to 11 years ago, when Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor of the history of science and coauthor of the book Merchants of Doubt, reviewed 928 abstracts of articles on anthropogenic climate change. She didn’t run across one that rejected it.
Says Powell:
The 97% is wrong, period. Look at it this way: If someone says that 97% of publishing climate scientists accept anthropogenic global warming, your natural inference is that 3% reject it. But I found only 0.006% who reject it. That is a difference of 500 times.
Powell has submitted his findings to a peer-reviewed journal, but his article has not been published yet.
In looking at the climate consensus studies, Taylor Hill of takepart.com probably exaggerates American ignorance by comparing Powell’s numbers to the March 2015 Gallup poll and Pew AAAS study, because the disbelief quotients on anthropogenic climate change there are on the high end. Had he chosen to highlight the New York Times/Stanford University poll taken during the same time period, the numbers would have appeared quite different.
Says Powell:
Many people evidently feel that they can accept the findings of science that they agree with and reject those that they find offensive or inconvenient. But it doesn’t work that way. Science is of a piece, all fitting together like a beautiful tapestry. To say that climate scientists are wrong is to say that all these fields are wrong and therefore science itself is wrong. But if it were, nothing would work. People can’t have it both ways.
Meanwhile, for fun, check out John Oliver of Last Week Tonight; Bill Nye, the Science Guy; and others in the video below. They’ve put together a fabulous take on “the climate consensus.”
Last edited by Eric the Green; 08-06-2015 at 09:12 PM.
Will the residents of Kivalina, Alaska be the first climate change refugees in the US?
PRI PRI
Adam Wernick, Science Friday
Scientists estimate that due to climate change, the village of Kivalina, in northwestern Alaska, will be underwater by the year 2025.
In 2008, the Inupiat village sued 24 of the world's biggest fossil fuel companies for damages. In 2013, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case and the village has declared it will not file a new claim in state court.
Meanwhile, nature, heedless of humankind’s eternal squabbles, goes about its business: the sea around Kivalina continues to rise, the storms get stronger, the ice gets thinner — and Kivalina's 400 residents must grapple with how to relocate in the decade they're estimated to have left.
Kivalina is on a very thin barrier reef island between the Chukchi Sea and the Kivalina Lagoon, in the northwest of Alaska, above the Arctic Circle. It takes three plane flights to get there: one to Anchorage; another to a town called Kotzebue; and a third, aboard a tiny cargo plane, to Kivalina.
Kivalina City Council member Colleen Swan says the people of the village rely for food mostly on what the environment, especially the ocean, provides for them. “It’s been our way to make a living for hundreds of years,” she says. “During the winter months the ice is part of our landscape, because we go out there and we set up camps and hunt, and it's all seasonal. We were able to see the changes years ago.”
In May, June and July, the men of the village go out on the ice hunting bearded seals. They cut up the seals, dry them and store them for the winter. “That provides the winter supply,” Swan says. “That’s what keeps us warm in the Arctic.”
About 15 years ago, the villagers noticed the season started two weeks early and the ice began to thin sooner than before. “We didn't notice at first the gradual change until it became two weeks early consistently from year to year,” Swan says. Now, she says, the hunters must remain vigilant, keeping a close eye on the ice, the seals and the sea. If they don't, they could miss the hunting season. “The hardest one to swallow was the fact that our ice wasn't safe any more for us to set up whaling camps,” Swan says.
The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the global average, so sea ice is forming on the Kivalina coastline later in the year and melting faster in the spring and summer. The lack of sea ice makes the island vulnerable to erosion from storms that occur regularly in the fall. Lack of sea ice also means warmer waters, which increase the severity of storms that hit the island.
The 2008 case against the fossil fuel companies was a 'public nuisance' claim that accused them of inflicting 'unreasonable harm' upon the villagers because they are among the world's largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Climate science is nearly unanimous on the point that increased greenhouse gases emissions are leading to sea level rise around the world.
The village originally voted to relocate as far back as 1992, but it is massively expensive. Their court case against the fossil fuel companies sought damages to help pay for the residents’ relocation. Now, with the case dismissed on the basis that its claims comes under rules of the Clean Air Act and not federal tort law, the villagers have nowhere to turn except the government. They did get a $500,000 grant last month from an arts organization to study relocation, but in general, no dice.
“Whenever we bring up relocation or climate change and ask, ‘Where do we go to talk about this with the government,’ the reply is always, ‘There's no agency set up to address those questions,’” Swan says.
Christine Shearer, who wrote about Kivalina's legal case in her book, Kivalina: A Climate Change Story, agrees. Disaster management policies are designed to deal with the aftermath of a disaster, she says. A disaster declaration releases funding aimed at helping a community rebuild or relocate within the place the disaster occurred. But there are no policies in place to relocate an entire community, like Kivalina, prior to an actual disaster.
“We don't have a federal agency in charge of that, and so it's really fallen on the people of Kivalina and other Alaskan natives in a similar situation to try to put that together themselves, and that's quite a task,” Shearer says.
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell visited Kivalina earlier this year and Colleen Swan sees some hope in that. Jewell’s visit was intended to raise awareness of Kivalina’s plight and to highlight that in the coming decades numerous other towns along US coastlines may face the same problem.
“More communities, more cities, more states, more tribes are going to have to deal with trying to help people who are being affected by climate change,” Christine Shearer says. “I think more lawsuits will be filed, and I think it might get to a point where fossil fuel companies might find it's less costly to settle than to keep fighting these lawsuits.”
Swan says she is exhausted by the stress of watching her community wash away and wondering whether they will need to evacuate. “We just had a minor storm last fall and I'm one of the first responders if anything goes wrong, so I keep an eye on things,” she says. “When we got that storm last fall, I decided I'm just going to go to sleep. I'm tired of worrying, I want to get some rest.”
“The next morning when I woke up, I saw the impacts from a minor storm and how quickly the water rose, and I realized that was a very dangerous thing for me to do, to sleep, to not face the reality of that night,” she continues.
“I realized this is what climate deniers do — not us. Not us, who face the reality every day. We wake up to it. There was never a debate for the people of Kivalina. We just wake up to it every morning.”
This story is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday with Ira Flatow.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/top...cid=spartandhp
http://spectator.org/articles/63670/...climate-hubris
...As his presidency wanes, Obama is desperately burnishing his eco-credentials with environmental zealots like Pope Francis and the leftists at the U.N. and in the European Union. But here at home, his plan would be a disaster economically, which explains its failure in Congress...
Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is imposing the Clean Power Plan on all fifty states, requiring each state to close down coal-burning electric plants, and shift to other sources of electricity — natural gas burning plants, nuclear plants, solar and wind power generators — in order to reduce carbon emissions by one third. New York will be less affected because it gets almost all its electric power from nuclear, natural gas, and hydroelectric plants. But nationwide, about 40 percent of electric power is produced by coal plants. Forcing these utilities to close will burn consumers with higher electric bills. It will also send hundreds of thousands of jobs a year up in smoke, as employers pay more to operate their businesses, according to Heritage Foundation economists.
And for what? The purported benefit is to avoid an imperceptible 0.02 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures by the year 2100. That’s the official EPA estimate of the benefits of this Clean Air Plan. You must be kidding...
-Oh, Eric. We've already covered that:
...that "overwhelming majority" is a pretty cherry-picked group.
Let me reiterate: "Science" is not the majority conclusion of self-proclaimed scientists. It is a method. The problem with HGW "science" is that whenever it's premises is tested, it comes a crapper. If it's adherents were honest, they'd start changing their premises. The fact that they don't is revealing.
-Hmmm... maybe with thinner ice, they could start taking a boat...
That's an oxymoron.
Full stop.
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