Sydney by Gus

Tim Forcey is searching for a concealed threat.

"We could be looking at a potential climate disaster here. We just don't know. It's hidden, invisible, unmeasured," he said.

The chemical engineer is a 35-year veteran of the oil and gas industry.

What he is looking for cannot be seen by the naked eye, or by an ordinary camera. But his is no ordinary camera.

"This is a sophisticated camera, military grade, that can detect invisible gases like methane," he said, showing me the $140,000 Forward Looking Infra-Red (FLIR) video recorder.

"The way that it does that is it has got a special device inside that can cool down the inside of the camera to minus 200 degrees Celsius."

At these cryogenic freezing temperatures, the special sensors in the camera can detect methane being emitted into the atmosphere.

He shows me a gas vent on a ridge in the coal fields outside Chinchilla in Queensland.

"You flop it over to the infrared and there you see the invisible gas now made visible," he said.

What the camera reveals is amazing: an invisible greenhouse smokestack venting methane into the atmosphere.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-28/methane-emissions-from-coal-seam-g...

 

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this national geographic cover special from mid 2008... our idiots in charge have not understood the message. it's 2016...
See also:
the lords of the flies

 

 

 

So what of the Trump presidency? Palmer has great hopes, and says we’re about to experience “an historical presidency.”

He speaks in glowing terms of Trump’s “America First Energy Plan” that promises to push hard for fossil fuel exploitation.

“I have been in and around Washington, D.C a long time. It’s an exciting time in our development and I think Donald Trump will succeed,” said Palmer. “This town still doesn’t. We are going to have eight years of Donald Trump and then eight years of President Pence so get ready. Then tell me what D.C. looks like after that period.”

Some might also ask what the prospects for avoiding catastrophic climate change might look like after a Trump presidency. 

According to Oreskes, climate science deniers like Palmer are understandably emboldened by Trump’s election.

“I think climate deniers are pretty darn pleased with themselves right now,” she said.

“If only they would think about the 1.9 million American homes that will be lost, worth nearly $900 billion dollars, if we see two meters of sea level rise this century, which scientists now think is wholly possible. Or the 30 million people in the Bay of Bengal who will become climate refugees. Where do they think those people will go?”

“I know, I know,” she adds.  “They don’t believe it.”

 

read more"

 

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/01/29/25-years-ago-fred-palmer-kick-started-first-fossil-fuel-funded-campaigns-attack-climate-science

 

Where Tony Abbott killed off a market mechanism to incentivise clean energy by reframing the debate as being about power prices, the current bunch have signalled they will attempt to stymie the transition to renewables in the name of “energy security”.

And watching the speed of the public rollout of the proposals to revisit so-called “clean coal” technology and fund new coalmines with public funding earmarked for clean energy, the whole process smacks of a coordinated industry-government campaign: create energy security crisis ignoring advice that renewables were not to blame for outages, position coal as the only short–term salvation, oh, and don’t say anything about the weather.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/21/the-canberra-coal-...

 

Public attitudes to climate change and policy options have been well documented in individual European countries (Engels, Huether, Schaefer, & Held, 2013; Poumadère, Mays, Slovic, Flynn, & Johnson, 1994; Slovic et al., 2000; Spence, Venables, Pidgeon, Poortinga, & Demski, 2010; Tvinnereim & Austgulen, 2014; Tvinnereim & Ivarsflaten, 2016; Zwick, Renn, Heinßen, Sautter, & Höhle, 2002) and a few specialized international comparisons exist (Bostrom et al., 2012). Cross-national opinion polls document general opinions about climate change across different countries and continents (e.g. Clamer, 2011; Eurobarometer, 2014; Ménioux & Zumsteeg, 2012). These large-scale opinion polls have been used to derive more theoretical interpretations about predictors of climate change perceptions (Lee et al, 2015; Tranter & Booth, 2015). However, to date no detailed cross-national research on climate change and energy preferences has been designed and conducted with the theoretical foundation required to fully understand how perceptions of climate change are formed and shaped by the national context.

The survey aimed to:

1. a)  identify the structure of climate change perceptions in France, Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom;

2. b)  give insight into public engagement with climate change responses and policies, including energy generation options;

3. c)  identify the role of individual socio-political values and other individual level factors; and

4. d)  identify the role of contextual national socio-political factors in explaining public perceptions and engagement with climate change.

   read more:

    http://orca.cf.ac.uk/98660/7/EPCC.pdf

Without any basis in federal statutes passed by Congress, Plaintiffs seek to employ creative and unprecedented legal theories to obtain a sweeping court order directed at virtually all aspects of U.S. Executive Branch decision-making concerning carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the development, transportation and consumption of fossil fuels. They assert claims primarily under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment and a federal version of the “public trust doctrine,” neither of which has, prior to this case, ever been interpreted to support a legal right relating to climate change. Much less, neither has been interpreted to furnish a private right of action for sweeping equitable relief unmoored from any statutory cause of action for relief concerning specifically-identified agency actions. For relief, they ask the Court to enjoin the Executive Branch to “prepare a consumption-based inventory of U.S. CO2 emissions,” and to “prepare and implement an enforceable national remedial plan to phase out fossil fuel emissions and draw down excess atmospheric CO2 . . . .” First Am. Compl. for Decl. and Inj. Relief 94, ECF No. 7 (“Compl.”). They also ask the Court to retain jurisdiction for an indefinite period of time to monitor and ensure that the President, his Executive Offices, and the various named Defendant agencies will comply with the “national remedial plan,” id., thus injecting the Court into the day-to-day management of the Federal Defendant entities. 

Federal Defendants moved to dismiss the complaint for lack of Article III standing and for failure to state a claim under the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause, the Fifth Amendment equal protection principle, the Ninth Amendment, and the public trust doctrine. Fed. Defs.’ Mot. to Dismiss, ECF No. 27. The National Association of Manufacturers, the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, and the American Petroleum Institute intervened in the case and moved to dismiss on these grounds and on the ground that the case presents non-justiciable political questions. Mem. in Supp. of Intervenor-Defs.’ Mot. to Dismiss, ECF No. 20. 

 

read more:

 

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/571d109b04426270152febe0/t/58c08d...

 

Trump Administration Pressing for Appeal, Dismissal of Climate LawsuitPosted by Dan Zegart 15sc on March 09, 2017 · Flag

The Trump administration is asking an Oregon federal judge in the Our Children's Trust case to let a higher court review her decision to permit a historic climate change lawsuit to proceed, and to halt the case pending the outcome of that review.

In 2015, a group of 21 young plaintiffs aged 9 to 20 from all over the United States, along with renowned climate scientist James Hansen, who is acting as guardian for future generations, sued the federal government for allegedly violating their constitutional rights via policies that promote global warming.

The suit, filed by the non-profit Our Children's Trust organization, claims there is a "public trust" obligation by the federal government under the constitution to take necessary measures to protect the climate.  In a November 10, 2016 decision, federal District Court Judge Ann Aiken agreed with the OCT plaintiffs, and ruled they were entitled under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to a trial to decide if the government failed in that duty, a startling decision.

In papers filed Monday, in Eugene, Oregon, U.S. Department of Justice attorneys requested permission from Judge Aiken to appeal her decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals - and also asked that the process be expedited due to "the significance of the issues raised and the burden on Federal Defendants that discovery is likely to impose."

read more:

 

http://www.climateinvestigations.org/trump_administration_pressing_for_a...

 

Following this week's NATO and G7 summits, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday that Europe "must take its fate into its own hands" as it sees the Western alliance divided by Brexit as well as Trump's reluctance to uphold the 2015 Paris climate accords, local media reported.

Addressing a crowd at an election rally in Munich, Merkel said that in the last few days, she had "experienced" that Germany and other European countries no longer can "completely rely on others."

On Thursday, Merkel attended the one-day NATO summit in Brussels, spending Friday and Saturday in Italy's Sicilian town of Taormina where the two-day G7 summit took place.

 

"We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands," she stressed, adding that Germany and other European countries would do their best to stay on good terms with the US and the post-Brexit UK. "We have to fight for our own destiny."

Merkel's comments follow Donald Trump's bid for more time to decide if the US would continue backing the 2015 Paris climate accords. Earlier today, US media reported that the president had allegedly informed his confidants that the United States will withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change. Secretary of Defense James Mattis subsequently refuted the rumors in an interview with CBS, saying that Trump is open to various positions concerning the US participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate.

 

 

Trump has repeatedly threatened to withdraw from the Paris accord that was concluded in 2015 between 194 countries as the full compliance with the agreement would reduce US GDP by $2.5 trillion over the next decade, explaining that it means "factories and plants closing all over the country."

The Paris climate agreement within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, championed by former US President Barack Obama, was ratified by 143 countries. It aims to hold the increase in average global temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial level by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with all the signatory states agreeing to reduce or limit their greenhouse gas emissions.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/politics/201705281054066771-merkel-us-britain-no...

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you're a fucking idiot...

The unprecedented crime Peter Carter and Elizabeth Woodworth refer to in the title is that of willfully causing global temperatures to rise, through greenhouse gas emissions, to levels already causing large-scale loss of life while threatening human survival and that of countless other species. They might with equal accuracy speak of crimes, plural, when those who from positions of authority either actively aid key offenders or, by failing to hold them to account, betray the trust placed in them.

This is the unique selling point of Unprecedented Crime: a closely argued insist­en­ce that, under existing laws and without recourse to new ones framed specifically to outlaw ecocide, we could indict corporate and governmental bodies identified without hyperbole by the authors as guilty of crimes against humanity.

Think about it. Ninety-seven percent of scientists in relevant disciplines are telling us climate change is real, is man-made and is taking us all, meaning humanity and other advanced life forms, down a roller coaster of environmental catastrophe. Not in some distant sci-fi dystopia but on a timescale measured in decades, years even. Given this, the scale and extent of denial – literal in the case of ‘sceptics’ in the pay of Fossil Fuels Inc; de facto in that of governmental cowardice and venality – are staggering. Why then, with the stakes so high, would we not view the perpetrators as guilty of crimes of a magnitude surpassing anything the world has seen – even in history’s darkest moments?

This is the premise of Carter and Woodworth’s case. Like any good scientist, they start with observable phenomena, as indicated by their opening chapter: Extreme Weather Around the World. From here they proceed, again as scientists do, to set out in Chapter Two the underlying drivers; in this case a heightening of earth’s natural and life-optimal greenhouse effect, to unnatural and decidedly sub-optimal levels, noting along the way a 1990 assertion by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that as a matter of certainty:

Emissions resulting from human activities are substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. These increases will enhance the green-house effect, resulting on average in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface temperature.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/10/22/50139/

 

Read from top.

 

See also: several million hiroshima bombs...  and:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

and:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/19279

 

and many other articles posted on this site about this critical subject.

 

 

In his article for the OffGuardian, Red And Green Should Never Be Seen, Graham Lindsay looses the plot. One wonders where he comes from. His short bio states "David Lindsay is a freelance journalist and an Independent political activist based in Lanchester, County Durham". One wonders to which political activism he is waving flags for in Lanchester? The industrialists, the nuke-power litanists? 

Here he goes:
If you hear echoes here of the debates around hunting or whaling, then, while I am not quite sure that I agree with you, I do take your point. Much as I take the point, without necessarily being quite sure that I agree with it, of those who see similarities between the attempted restriction of Second Amendment rights in the United States and the impending attempt to ban private drone ownership in Britain after the recent carry on at Gatwick Airport. There is no evidence that there ever was a drone there, and indeed Sussex Police publicly denied it until “a conference call” with “the Cabinet Office” changed their tune. But look out for every “security” measure of which most Labour and all Conservative MP have been dreaming since the days when Tony Blair was Shadowing Michael Howard at the Home Office. “Security”, and especially “Islamist terrorism”, is one of the two supposedly unanswerable pretexts for doing absolutely anything that had already been in the head of the person advocating it. The other used to be called “the environment”, then it was called “global warming”, and now it is called “climate change”.

No wonder David attracts loonies such as Seamus Padraig, a regular denialist on a few blogs, as far as I can see:
• Jan, 8, 2019
I used to accept–on faith, really–the existence of ‘global warming’. But three decades on, I am now entertaining real doubts. The climate has simply not changed perceptibly over that rather long period of time. Certainly not enough to melt the polar ice caps and inundate our coastal cities as they were predicting! (For that matter, have we even lost so much as one, single Pacific atoll?)
No, I now believe that ‘global warming’ was just a hoax to make people feel better about de-industrializing the West and moving all our factories to the Third World. But don’t take it from me! Read F. William Engdahl: ‘The Dark Story Behind Global Warming aka Climate Change’.


This is more bullshit than old turds stagnating in a blocked toilet. First to accept on-faith the existence of global warming is to be religiously idiotic. Padraig is "now entertaining real doubts”. So global warming is now a hoax in his little mind. I supposed he has not read the last literature on observations, which I trust he now distrusts because F. William Engdahl told him so. In F. William Engdahl’s exposé, there is not a single scientific exploration of real facts and figures, just vague rebuttals that coud not hold water in an old leaky felt hat. And between you and me I would bet that Padraig NEVER accepted-on faith the concept of global warming. 
So, we are invited to read the dark side of the story where at one point, it is said:
An Australian IT expert and independent researcher, John McLean, recently did a detailed analysis of the IPCC climate report. He notes that HadCRUT4 is the primary dataset used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to make its dramatic claims about “man-made global warming”, to justify its demands for trillions of dollars to be spent on “combating climate change.” But McLean points to egregious errors in the HadCRUT4 used by IPCC. He notes, “It’s very careless and amateur. About the standard of a first-year university student.” Among the errors, he cites places where temperature “averages were calculated from next to no information. For two years, the temperatures over land in the Southern Hemisphere were estimated from just one site in Indonesia.” In another place he found that for the Caribbean island, St Kitts temperature was recorded at 0 degrees C for a whole month, on two occasions. The HadCRUT4 dataset is a joint production of the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit  at the University of East Anglia. This was the group at East Anglia that was exposed several years ago for the notorious Climategate scandals of faking data and deleting embarrassing emails to hide it. Mainstream media promptly buried the story, turning attention instead on “who illegally hacked East Anglia emails.” 


Here if a raccoon-sized rat has not emerged from the flushing pan in your brain it is because your pigeon-loft you use as intelligence processor is full of bird poop.
The East-Anglia email saga was sorted out quite a while ago and the "embarrassing data" was not embarrassing. It was relating to a plateau in rise of temperature, when some (only a few) scientists questioned why the data did not match the prediction. NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS.
Following this plateau of “non-rising” temperatures, came a few years that OUTDID THE PREDICTIONS by massive increase (relatively in geological timeframe) in temperatures. As mentioned on my articles the rise of temperatures are not smooth, but in a see-saw action with a trend towards increase, all this due to many and various "feedback" mechanisms.
The last four years (2015-2016-2017-2018) have been the warmest on record, though 2018 was the least warm of them. Does this mean that the trend is cooling? Nupe... Rubbish. The temperature trend HAS TO INCREASE, according to the well tested and improved formulas, as devised by Svante Arrhenius 120 years ago with his study of Ice Ages. 

Anyway enough of this ratbaggery. Let’s get serious. John McLean, Seamus Padraig and Graham Lindsay do not even make it in the extensive database of individual climate deniers involved in the global warming denial industry, of Desmog. They are minnows with brains the size of gnats' digestive tract.

 “…  the temperatures over land in the Southern Hemisphere were estimated from just one site in Indonesia.” is a horrendously misrepresentative and inaccurate statement. 

This is where the OffGuardian site should be far more accurate and on the ball. This article "Red And Green Should Never Be Seen” by David Lindsay is an unfortunate indulgence to its hate of anything the Guardian does. This article should have NEVER BEEN SEEN.
It is important that workers of any colours, white collar, blue collar or communist red realise that their future depends on the natural health of this planet. This means a lot of scientific expertise has been activated to measure the way humans encroach, change and eventually destroy by various means — from rubbish to overpopulation — the “necessary” natural balances. For example should photosynthesis be compromised by a few percentage points, we would face major troubles. 
In regard to global warming, this stupid article by Graham Lindsay is quite mild compared to a previous OffGuardian crap, but it still tends to devalue the importance of “the environment”. Red and Green are always seen at Christmas and are the official colours of the Rabbitohs, the Rugby League team that defeated Rupert Murdoch in the streets, in the courts and eventually on the fields. 
It is time that workers and greenies worked together to create a better world which at the moment is highjacked by the rich, whether they are Republicans or Democrats. 
Time to understand that from the day, we, individuals, without instrumentation, are able to feel and see global warming, we would have about five years to kiss our arse goodbye. And the first instalment is approaching. 
Gus Leonisky
Climate expert.
Note climate change and global warming are two different explorations of climatic reactivity.
Climate change is a natural variation. Global warming is the human induced warming regardless of "climate change", by adding EXTRA CO2 (and other warming gases from burning fossil fuels) in the atmosphere. As explained in a quarter of a nobel prize... CO2 by itself does not warm up the atmosphere, it needs to react with some specific infrared wavelength from sunlight.

Please read:

 

a quarter of a nobel prize...

 

be gentle...

 

"The worst, the biggest, the strongest, the wildest, the hottest"...

 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

 

Read from top.

 

Several countries have proposed their own versions of a Green New Deal, but climate change knows no borders. We need a global response.

By Yanis Varoufakis and David Adler

 

In times of crisis and catastrophe, children are often forced to grow up quickly. We are now witnessing this premature call to action on a planetary scale. As the adults in government accelerate their consumption of fossil fuels, children are leading the campaign against our species’ looming extinction. Our survival now depends on the prospects for a global movement to follow their lead and demand an International Green New Deal.

Several countries have proposed their own versions of a Green New Deal. Here in Europe, DiEM25 and our European Spring coalition are campaigning under the banner of a detailed Green New Deal agenda. In the UK, a new campaign is pushing similar legislation with MPs such as Caroline Lucas and Clive Lewis. And in the US, dogged activists in the Sunrise Movement are working with representatives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to push their proposal to the front of the political agenda.

But these campaigns have largely remained siloed. Their advisers may exchange notes and ideas, but no strategy has emerged to coordinate these campaigns in a broader, global framework.

Unfortunately, climate change knows no borders. The US may be the second-largest polluter in the world, but it makes up less than 15% of global greenhouse emissions. Leading by example is simply not enough.

Instead, we need an International Green New Deal: a pragmatic plan to raise $8tn – 5% of global GDP – each year, coordinate its investment in the transition to renewable energy and commit to providing climate protections on the basis of countries’ needs, rather than their means.

Call it the Organization for Emergency Environmental Cooperation – the namesake of the original OEEC 75 years ago. While many US activists find inspiration in a “second world war-style mobilization”, the International Green New Deal is better modeled by the Marshall plan that followed it. With financial assistance from the US government, 16 countries formed the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), dedicated to rebuilding the infrastructure of a devastated continent and coordinating its supply of energy.

But if the original OEEC entrenched an extractive capitalism at Europe’s core –protecting the steel and coal cartel – the new organization for an International Green New Deal can empower communities around the world in a single transformational project.

The transnational scope of this mobilization is crucial for three main reasons.

The first is production. Recent studies show that, as long as countries cooperate, all continents have the wind, solar and hydropower resources they need in a zero-emissions world. Northern countries and mountainous regions have better access to wind power, while southern lands are better suited to exploiting the sun. An International Green New Deal could exploit these differences and ensure that renewable energy is available to all of them year-round.

The second is innovation. Confronting the climate crisis will require more than keeping fossil fuels in the ground. We will also need major scientific breakthroughs to develop renewable sources of energy, adapt existing infrastructure, detoxify our oceans and decarbonize the atmosphere. No country alone can fund the research and development necessary to meet these challenges. The OEEC would pool the brainpower of the global scientific community: a Green Manhattan Project.

The third is reparation. For centuries, countries such as the US and the UK have plundered natural resources from around the world and polluted them back out. Less developed nations have been doubly dispossessed: first, of their resource wealth, and second, of their right to a sustainable life – and in the case of many small island developing states, of their very right to exist. An International Green New Deal would redistribute resources to rehabilitate overexploited regions, protect against rising sea levels, and guarantee a decent standard of living to all climate refugees.

The UN climate change conferences will not save us from extinction – the demise of the Paris agreement should be evidence enough. These frameworks lock us into prisoners’ dilemmas, in which every country has an incentive to defect on their climate commitments, even if cooperation between them would yield a greater collective good. As long as climate cooperation is framed around sacrifice, it is vulnerable to strongmen like Donald Trump who vow to buck international rules in the name of national interests.

The International Green New Deal changes the frame. Rather than pleading for restraint, it sets out a positive-sum vision of international investment, in which the gains from joining in outweigh those to going it alone.

This is the strategy that won Franklin D Roosevelt the original New Deal. His plan addressed people who had given up hope and inspired in them the idea that there isan alternative. That there are ways of pressing idle resources into public service. It made sense to the disheartened and offered opportunity to the entrepreneurial.

The same is true of the International Green New Deal, which mobilizes public finance to crowd in private investments that, together, fund the $8tn transition. Just like in the original New Deal, public financing will involve a mix of taxes and bond instruments. On the former, we can introduce a global minimum corporate tax rate that is then redistributed on the basis of their sales. On the latter, public investment banks – including the European Investment Bank, the World Bank and the KfW, Germany’s state-owned development bank – can coordinate the issue of green bonds that the major central banks agree collectively to support in the secondary markets.

Suddenly, countries with large trade surpluses will realize they are better able to invest their excess capital if green investments in deficit countries are coordinated under the auspices of an international plan. The positive-sum dynamic will prevail.

In this sense, the stakes of the International Green New Deal are not merely environmental. By uniting countries in the project of bottom-up economic transformation – and coercing multinationals to fund their fair share of it – it will also stem the tide of bigotry and xenophobia engulfing the world.

“Advanced” capitalist countries today are literally falling apart. In the US, net public investment has fallen below half of one per cent of GDP. Across the eurozone, net public investment has remained below zero for nearly a decade. It is little wonder that political monsters are rising again: just as in the 1930s, the grapes of wrath are ripening and “growing heavy for the vintage”.

To revive the liberal democratic project, some pundits have suggested making China into a bogeyman. But the real bogeyman is of our creation: a climate crisis wrought by decades of inaction and underinvestment. To address the true existential threat that we face today, we must reverse the economic policies that brought us to this brink. Austerity means extinction.

The promise of an International Green New Deal to is to avoid the pitfalls of cold war politics and unite humanity in the only project capable of preserving a habitable planet. To do this, however, we need a powerful progressive international movement to demand that our leaders begin to act beyond their own borders. Let’s start building it. The children are watching.

• Yanis Varoufakis is the co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement and the former finance minister of Greece. David Adler is a writer and a member of DiEM25’s Coordinating Collective. He lives in Athens, Greece

Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/23/international-gree...


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See also: antarctica...

 

...

Despite Trump, New York City is enacting a $20 billion programme to combat the local effects of climate change, addressing such issues as coastal protection and drainage capacity. The coastline around Lower Manhattan is being raised twenty feet above the current sea level. Millions of additional trees have been planted across the city to help to control rising summer temperatures. All new builds have to meet stringent green requirements. New protections have been created to prevent the flooding of the subway system. “Managed retreat” plans have been enacted as a result of Hurricane Sandy more than six years ago. Congestion pricing will be introduced in the next two years and vehicle emissions are intended to be halved by 2025. Will that be sufficient? And how much is London investing in something similar?

Late last year, London mayor Sadiq Khan and civic leaders in other cities also declared “a climate emergency”. Khan’s plan is to make his city carbon neutral by 2050, but he does not explain how you achieve such a target in a metropolis that has by then been under water for fifteen years. The London Assembly wisely passed a motion to bring forward Khan’s target by twenty years. But is it realistic?

What seems clear is that politicians generally, ever mindful of this week’s measure of popularity, have no will to do more than nibble at the edges. They may have calculated that they’ll be dead by 2050 and so they won’t care. But if they are out by as many years as the scientists now fear, some at least of them will live to see their names reviled and perhaps find themselves hunted down by starving and vengeful refugees, many of those refugees being people who thought they were immune to tomorrow’s disaster. Then the politicians might learn too late something about irresponsibility, disruption and cost.

 

read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/05/08/above-us-the-waves/

 

 

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William HBonney

Climate Science, a new religion?

I would say so….Amazingly, no-one seems to recognise that is an almost complete facsimile, of one we have almost completely cast off, namely, christianity, itself, derived from sun worship..

1)Greed and licentiousness leading to man’s downfall? Check
2)A day of reckoning, some indeterminate day in the future? Check
3)A fiery burning hell? Check
4)An absolute denial that reduced population might alleviate the notional problems? Check
(the meek will inherit the earth here, as well)
5)An insistence that the belief be taught as fact to schoolchildren? Check
(not at all sinister, and redolent of Jesuit teaching)
6)The idea that the rich can indulge their affluent and polluting lifestyle, and yet offset their hypocrisy? Check
(medieval indulgencies)
7)A blamelessly austere, youthful figure, curiously free of teenage acne, seemingly emerging from nowhere, to educate us on our evil ways, and the fate that awaits us, should we not seek the path of virtue….
8) The mistaken belief that the sun can provide anything an expanding world population might desire, but we shouldn’t try and emulate it on earth…
(why the f*** not?)

Number 5 seems the most dangerous to me. The whole point of teaching science to schoolchildren is that it is a way of thinking…An education in science frees us from the need to take anyone’s word for anything, and if one can only recall the scientific method, and nothing else, then you are a scientist, free to question, free to experiment…Everything taught in school science lessons is reproduceable in the laboratory, or at least has an element of empiricism one can point to, that prevents it from being mere dogma. Thus, while one might find it inconvenient to recreate the Michelson Morley experiment to demonstrate the invariance of light speed, and hence Special and General relativity, the fact that someone in a science class is bound to have a gps equipped device, is de facto empirical proof.
Climate science has nothing like that, it is propagated as an unchallengeable fact, that mere mortals are not qualified to question, but eminently qualified to accept as gospel.
Post anything like this in the environmental pages of the Guardian, and thinly disguised Guardian moderators (like Rockyrex, loco-p-man etc) will swarm around your comment, linking to ‘scientific’ papers they can have no empirical view on, and it is doubtful they even understand, in the mistaken belief that the cure for atheism is more bible study…

A green new deal? No thanks, I won’t vote for that.

————————————

Here we have the typical denialist songbook being attached to an anonymous STUPID article at the OffGuardian. We expect better than what follows:

YouGov credits Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion with boosting these numbers, and indeed, given the amount of exposure both have received in the “Left” media (BBC, NYT, Indy, Guardian and more) it would be surprising if they had not raised the profile of climate change for the average person. 

We’re going to be taking a closer look at both Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion in the near future, but for now we’ll share Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s much-vaunted Green New Deal for discussion (see embedded below or click here).

Is this a real attempt to create a more sustainable world? Or just a cynical attempt by the neoliberal pseudo-left to grab credibility and maybe make some bucks?

Some of its proposals – like sustainable “family” farming seem commendable and pretty solid. Others – such as its vague requirements to reduce greenhouse emisions – “as much as technologically feasible” – seem hopelessly ambiguous, and indeed contradicted by other aspirations including “assuring affordable access to electricity.” 

Is making the US 100% dependent on renewables with zero emissions compatible with the other stated intention of rebuilding American industry and creating employment? 

Is this document a practical step forward or a Green word salad to entice the well-meaning and concerned?

Read more:
https://off-guardian.org/2019/06/05/the-green-new-deal-hot-air-or-genuin...


Is OffGuardian dumb or deceiving? Can this OG website that claims to be better than slice cheese do better? A quick note:
Billy the Kid (born Henry McCarty September 17 or November 23, 1859 – July 14, 1881, also known as William H. Bonney) was an American Old West outlaw and gunfighter who killed eight men before he was shot and killed at age 21. Billy the Kid (William HBonney) was a stupid dangerous kid. Things have not changed much with that name...

Hopefully, the Off Guardian will find a decent reply to the crap presented by silly “Billy the Kid” (William HBonney), AND TO ITS GENERALLY BAD ARTICLE WITH NO BYLINE, but I don’t hold my breath. This OffGuardian site in its FULL anti Guardian mode is forgetting the first rule of knowledge: knowing. 

So, it has been the denialist credo to claim that “climate science is a religion”. BULLSHIT. Anyone can present arguments against the science of global warming as long as these arguments are scientifically verifiable. THERE IS NO RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN THIS. Science is not “a religion”.

1) Greed and licentiousness leading to man’s downfall? Check. 
NO. At this stage, science does not tell of human downfall but of precise and general problem that can develop from uncheck global warming which is happening whether we like it or not.


2) A day of reckoning, some indeterminate day in the future? Check
NO. No day of “reckoning”, but changes in our comforts such as rise in sea level, destruction of the Great barrier Reef and heat, drought, wind and storms stronger than what we’ve experienced so far.


3) A fiery burning hell? Check
NO. Hell is for the god believers. Scientists present a less sinister case but a strong warning about global warming.


4)An absolute denial that reduced population might alleviate the notional problems? Check
(the meek will inherit the earth here, as well)
YES. The more we populate, the more energy we demand. The more energy coming from coal and oil, the more global warming we create. It’s a simple equation.


5)An insistence that the belief be taught as fact to schoolchildren? Check(not at all sinister, and redolent of Jesuit teaching)
YES. But this is not a BELIEF. The science of global warming is not a BELIEF, but a verified (and verifiable) collection of SCIENTIFIC facts that point to a change in climatic conditions due to EXTRA CO2 and other warming gases in the atmosphere. These gases simply come from our burning of fossil fuels. (If the word "sciences" offends you, go fuck yourself…)


6)The idea that the rich can indulge their affluent and polluting lifestyle, and yet offset their hypocrisy? Check (medieval indulgencies)

This is COMPLETE rubbish. No one can “offset” the complacency of “the rich” [countries]. Rich countries have to do far more to pull back on their emissions of warming gases. No ifs and buts. Whether the US and other rich countries try hard to avoid their responsibility in this major problem is IRRELEVANT TO THE PROBLEM.


7) A blamelessly austere, youthful figure, curiously free of teenage acne, seemingly emerging from nowhere, to educate us on our evil ways, and the fate that awaits us, should we not seek the path of virtue….

PAY FUCKING ATTENTION, YOU TWIT! The kids know far more than you’ll ever know… This HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH VIRTUE — ONLY warming gases...


8) The mistaken belief that the sun can provide anything an expanding world population might desire, but we shouldn’t try and emulate it on earth…
(why the f*** not?)

William HBonney, If you understand what you wrote here, you have missed the IQ boat or lack a few neurones...

Climate science has nothing like that, it is propagated as an unchallengeable fact, that mere mortals are not qualified to question, but eminently qualified to accept as gospel. 
If you are a mere mortal with an understanding of scientific processes, you can challenge the sciences at will. No problem. But on most occasions, mere mortal who challenge the “theory of global warming” have not a clue about it. This is the difference between sciences and some “mere mortals”. Some mere mortals have studied the sciences carefully without prejudices and can find every hole in the denialists', including some contrary scientists', argumentation and analysis of facts.


Post anything like this in the environmental pages of the Guardian, and thinly disguised Guardian moderators (like Rockyrex, loco-p-man etc) will swarm around your comment, linking to ‘scientific’ papers they can have no empirical view on, and it is doubtful they even understand, in the mistaken belief that the cure for atheism is more bible study…


Now we know. You are pissed off because the Guardian is “pro-doing something about climate change” and you’re not. Empirical views on this subject are a bit stupid. …”Mistaken belief that the cure for atheism is more bible study?”… Do you mean… ah fuck, you are an idiot and the boffins at OffGuardian are idiots to present a case which is not defendable.

GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL AND ANTHROPOGENIC. The sciences behind this statement are hugely complex and simple at the same time. They are simple in the sense that we know that adding warming gases into the atmosphere, will warm the atmosphere. Simple. The complexities come with assessing the changes, including the delays in the cause and effect as well as the feedback mechanisms AND THE ATMOSPHERIC RESULTANT DISTURBANCES. 

OffGuardian is COMPLETELY Off. I wrote a piece already about OffGuardian’s crap on global warming (READ AT TOP). Then I wrote a piece explaining in the simplest terms possible What is global warming? As a response to the offensive article OffGuardian had published under a fake name (Sapere Aude)... and now a stupid article with no name attached. A fake one would have been better than this anonymity. 



We had, I hope, an understanding that OffGuardian would publish my response. After demanding some “silly” changes (such as changing “denialist” to some other “less offensive wording”, OffGuardian decided not publish my piece as “on this subject OffGuardian was “ignorant” or such and would not continue to publish “on this subject” in the future. It just did and deserved to be hammered!

So get a life, OffGuardian. Realise that NOT ALL that is published on The Guardian is crap nor deserves to be trashed. 

 

Will

Re: stupid. That stuff, up there, in the sky, it’s not condensation: check. 

Gus: Do you mean CLOUDS are not condensed water vapour?


Carbon isn’t poison: check. 
G: This is meaningless. Global warming is not about carbon but about the EXTRA CARBON DIOXIDE that natural systemcannot absorb.


It’s been much warmer in the past when there much less of it about: check. 
G: Yes, it has been warmer and colder too, and this is dependent on the Milankovitch cycles of the earth and on the GASEOUS MIX in the atmosphere. CO2 is basically responsible for 20 per cent of the “heat stability” of the atmosphere. The major gas responsible for the rest is water vapour which despite variability in its appearance (clear humidity or cloudy) has less overall effect on the changes of the average temperature of the planet. Remove CO2 altogether and the planet average temperature plummets 35 degrees Celsius. 

Colder, too: check. 
G: Read above comment.

The climate is enormously complicated: check. 
G: Yes, the climate is complicated but compared to quantum mechanics, it is far less so. Yet, despite weather phenomenon being “erratic” (chaotic turbulence), climatic conditions can be studied on trends of temperature, humidity, pressure and strength of atmospheric changes. This study — computing many of these present signs — points to a change to a warmer trend.

There has been no warming, to speak of, in twenty years: check. 
G: This is a rubbish statement.

The seas are not rising quickly: check. 
G: The rise of sea levels are not obvious but presently measurable to around 3 mm per year.

There is no evidence to link ‘climate change’ to extreme weather events: check. 
G: True. But the frequency, unusual timing and strength of extreme weather events coincide well with predictions of warmer climate.

Every prediction made by the alarmists has turned out to be just that, alarmism: check. 
G: Obviously your village or your local military airfield has not been destroyed by recent one a never seen before event. This is why the pentagon is paying attention to global warming...

They’ve been caught out lying, and messing with the data: check. 
G: Who are THEY? The GW data has never been messed up with...

Thirty years ago, it was global cooling: check. 
G: Rubbish. The first inkling of global warming was measured, calculated and postulated by Svante Arrhenius back in 1897. That other scientists did not subscribe to the concept did not mean he was wrong. According to the Milankovitch cycles, we should slowly be going towards a full-blown ice age in 100,000 years.

Human beings have actually been going on about this, and making alarmist predictions, for centuries: check. 
G: That is only a religious viewpoint that has nothing to do with scientific observations.

The greenhouse gases are a trace element in the atmosphere: check. 
G: This is meaningless. What is a trace element in this regard? 0.003, 0.3 or 10 per cent of atmospheric content?

Carbon accounts for about 3% of these greenhouse gases: check. 
G: This is rubbish. There is no “carbon” in the atmosphere. There is Carbon dioxide to the present proportion of 400 parts per million (ppm). The natural maximum has been 300 ppm for more than 500,000 years that have included 4 major Ice Ages (when carbon dioxide went down to 180 ppm). There is also a tinier quantity of carbon monoxide as well which has no influence on climatic conditions.
The human portion of this 3% is about 3% (in other words, what we contribute to the ‘problem’ is 3% of 3% of a trace element, in an enormously complex system): check. 
G: This is idiotic. Humans have added 100 parts per million of CO2 to the atmosphere. 

Shame on anyone who’s still throwing around the absurd putdown ‘conspiracy theorist’. It’s a post-intelligence world. Everything is hidden in plain sight. Get a grip.
G: Yes. Shame on you for not understanding something that is simple: CO2 is a warming gas that only reacts to specific wavelength of the light spectrum (infrared electromagnetic wavelengths) from the sun, like water reacts to specific electromagnetic wavelengths in your microwave oven.


(Oh, I forgot to add: Antarctic ice is expanding; and the other pole is doing just fine).
G: This is rubbish. Antarctic is losing far more ice than it is gaining. The north pole could be free of summer ice within the next 40 years.
”Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” – Einstein
G: It always make idiots (and the Scientologists) feel superior to associate themselves with Einstein. Carry on studying the theories (2 of them) of relativity. You might learn something.
-------------------------
Lucky, some people bring some sanity back to the debate...

John Thatcher:
"A rather poor article, and depressingly ignorant responses below the line. Sigh”

Read from top. Read article above this one.

The Off Guardian is going off the train tracks again on global warming... It has published another of these iffy articles on the subject and this one is disguised a bit better with some "truths" that are misused and a bit of plausible bullshit. There, in conclusion, Renee Pearsons tells us:

 

As Earth’s evolutionary climate cycles observe the Universal law of the natural world, the Zero Point Field, which produces an inexhaustible source of ‘free’ energy that Nikola Tesla spoke of, is the means by which inter stellar vehicles travel through time/space.  The challenge for ingenious, motivated Earthlings is to harness and extract the ZPF proclaiming a new planetary age of technological innovation with no rapacious industry, no pollution, no shortages, no gas guzzlers and no war.

 

 

One wonders how someone writing this novel new-age hysterical hubris can become a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. Sure, Renee sounds like a green Giaia Queen as she has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. Wow, my hat to her for surviving her own shit.

 

Yes we know that variations in insolation interferes with the weather, but we can also say that CO2 and its companion warming gases, methane and NOx, have far far far far more influence on climatic trends, under present conditions (since about one million years). Presently global warming is piggy-backing on one of the normal climatic cycle with OUR EXTRA CO2 (plus methane and NOx) from our burning of fossil fuels. As much as I love Tesla (I have his complete original writings), his comic cosmic ideas are totally loony and do not fit one iota the observations of proper cosmology. I hope to find some fairy dust and some ZPF energy (untameable) in my dreams.

 

I will draw you to read from top, but first, read a critique by someone a bit more polite than me. 

 

JUNE 14, 2019

Global Warming and Solar Minimum: a Response to Renee Parsons

 

by MANUEL GARCÍA, JR.

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Following are my comments about Global Warming Morphs Into the Solar Minimum by Renee Parsons.

As far as I know climate change (CC) computer models include the variations of insolation (i.e., sunspot cycles, and the Milankovitch Cycles set by solar-earth alignments and angle changes over time) as part of the external radiation driving function (i.e., solar radiation falling on Earth over time). IPCC is an agency that reviews peer reviewed science publications by research scientist/modelers calculating estimated resulting average (and regional) global temperatures of the biosphere over time. Said researchers then try to compare their calculations with experimental data / field observations of CO2, CH4 and air/ocean temperature measurements (current and fossil from: tree rings, ice cores, mineral deposits).

Also, it has long been known to the scientists that the amount and distribution of water vapor and droplets in the atmosphere — clouds, fog, mist, humidity — is/are the most difficult parameter (parameters) to include in the computer models because such atmospheric moisture is so rapidly transient and localized, and so intimately entwined with local temperature and wind patterns (weather). Water vapor has always been known as the major gas/vapor storage medium of atmospheric heat. Also, clouds have a significant effect on the magnitude of the albedo (sunlight reflection coefficient, hence a localized cooling effect, similar to that of snow and ice caps)

CC modelers try to include these atmospheric water effects by “knobs” and “fudge factors” in the computer codes, because simulating them from fundamental principles is so incredibly difficult: because of their very fine spatial scale localization, and their extremely rapid transience. The idea being that some level of inclusion (of humidity physics), however sketchy and approximate, is better than none. So different models (computer programs) will give slightly different “answers” depending on what assumptions and “knob settings” the programmers used. That is why IPCC reviews many such published results and arrives at a consensus among them, in characterizing current science’s understanding of CC geo-chemical physics.

Her last paragraph is quite a stretch, really reaching into science fiction. Zero Point Energy is certainly a physics concept (and reality), but humanity has no access to it as a controllable source of “free” energy. “Interstellar vehicles” meaning comets, asteroids, meteors, rocks, human-produced-and-abandoned space junk, cosmic dust, planets and stars all move because of gravity and inertia (Isaac Newton), and where “pushed” by radiation pressure (from sunlight and starlight) and shock waves from stellar explosions (of mass, magnetism and radiation).

The “free” energy Nikola Tesla tapped into was the electrical potential (voltage difference) between the surface of the Earth and the ionosphere: a high altitude layer of electrically charge atmosphere, caused by ionization initiated by UV rays from the Sun, as well as the capture of solar-ejected protons (positive electrically charged particles that had been the nuclei of hydrogen atoms), whose capture by Earth’s magnetic field causes the Aurora Borealis. Tesla figured out how to pump energy into this “earth battery” (or earth capacitor, as he was using the Earth as part of an LC circuit) by injecting radio waves of a particular frequency that resonated with the size of this battery gap, and bounced within it (reflecting back down from the ionosphere), cycling the globe. So, a receiving station elsewhere on Earth could pick up such signals, and “gain energy.” But it is not an efficient process for transmitting energy in large amounts for industrial purposes, over distance — it’s basically a very limited form of “radio” that when converted to audio sounds like recorded whale clicks and whistles. 

So, I am somewhat skeptical of all of Renee Parsons’ statements and conclusions; many are okay, but the overall outlook is a bit “spacey,” in my view.

ALSO, I have tried to give a little bit of an explanation of non-linearity effects (lags, gaps, stops, accelerations, multi-valuedness) in CC geo-chemical physics here:

The Latent Heat of Climate Change, Redux

28 May 2019 (29 July 213)

https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/05/28/the-latent-heat-of-climate-change-redux/

Finally, for reference, my detailed outline of CC geo-chemical physics, and my detailed description of CC computer modeling (and the IPCC) are presented in the following two articles, respectively:

Closing The Cycle: Energy and Climate Change
25 January 2014
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2014/01/25/closing-the-cycle-energy-and-climate-change/

Climate and Carbon, Consensus and Contention
18 September 2017, (4 June 2007)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/09/18/climate-and-carbon-consensus-and-contention/

I am glad as more people get interested in global warming / climate change, but I also want their understanding and pronouncements about this topic to be accurate: scientifically sound, and reasonable.

 

Read more:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/14/global-warming-and-solar-minimum-a-response-to-renee-parsons/

 

 

 

 

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf (“ESAS”) is the epicenter of a methane-rich zone that could turn the world upside down.

Still, the ESAS is not on the radar of mainstream science, and not included in calculations by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and generally not well understood. It is one of the biggest mysteries of the world’s climate puzzle, and it is highly controversial, which creates an enhanced level of uncertainty and casts shadows of doubt.

The ESAS is the most extensive continental shelf in the world, inclusive of the Laptev Sea, the East Siberian Sea, and the Russian portion of the Chukchi Sea, all-in equivalent to the combined landmasses of Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy and Japan.

The region hosts massive quantities of methane (“CH4”) in frozen subsea permafrost in extremely shallow waters, enough CH4 to transform the “global warming” cycle into a “life-ending” cycle. As absurd as it sounds, it is not inconceivable.

Ongoing research to unravel the ESAS mystery is found in very few studies, almost none, except by Natalia Shakhova (International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska/Fairbanks) a leading authority, for example: “It has been suggested that destabilization of shelf Arctic hydrates could lead to large-scale enhancement of aqueous CH4, but this process was hypothesized to be negligible on a decadal–century time scale. Consequently, the continental shelf of the Arctic Ocean (AO) has not been considered as a possible source of CH4 to the atmosphere until very recently.” (Source: Natalia Shakhova, et al, Understanding the Permafrost–Hydrate System and Associated Methane Releases in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, Geosciences, 2019)

Shakhova’s “until very recently” comment explains, in part, why the IPCC does not include ESAS methane destabilization in its calculations. Meanwhile, Shakhova’s research has unearthed a monster in hiding, but thankfully, mostly in repose… for the moment. Still, early-stage warning signals are clearly noticeable; ESAS is rumbling, increasingly emitting more and more CH4, possibly in anticipation of a “Big Burp,” which could put the world’s lights out, hopefully in another century, or beyond, but based upon a reading of her latest report in Geosciences, don’t count on it taking so long.

Shakhova’s research is highlighted in a recent article in Arctic News: “When Will We Die?” d/d June 10, 2019, which states: “Imagine a burst of methane erupting from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean that would add an amount of methane to the atmosphere equal to twice the methane that is already there.”

Horror of horrors, the resulting equation is disturbing, to say the least, to wit: Twice the amount of CH4 that is already in the atmosphere equals a CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) of 560 ppm, assuming CH4 is 150xs the potency of CO2 in its initial years. And, adding that new number to current CH4/CO2e of 280 ppm to current CO2 levels of 415.7 ppm, according to readings at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, equals total atmospheric CO2 of 1256 ppm.

In other words, if ESAS springs a big fat leak, the Big Burp, which would only be <5% of the existing frozen methane deposit; it is possible that atmospheric CO2e would zoom up go as high as 1256 ppm.

What happens next?

A recent third-party study, also referenced in the aforementioned Arctic News article d/d June 10th, concluded that at 1200 ppm atmospheric CO2 global heating cranks up by 8°C, or 14.4°F, within a decade. (Source: Arctic News d/d June 10, 2019). Truth be known, that scenario is not problematic, it’s catastrophic and too far along to be classified as a problem. After all, problems can be fixed; catastrophes are fatal.

According to Shakhova’s research, as referenced in Geosciences/ 2019: “Releases could potentially increase by 3–5 orders of magnitude, considering the sheer amount of CH4 preserved within the shallow ESAS seabed deposits and the documented thawing rates of subsea permafrost reported recently. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the ESAS permafrost–hydrates system, which is largely unfamiliar to scientists,” Ibid. (Side note: 3 orders of magnitude is equivalent to 1,000, i.e., a large methane release.)

More from Shakhova: “Here we present results of the first comprehensive scientific re-drilling to show that subsea permafrost in the near-shore zone of the ESAS has a downward movement of the ice-bonded permafrost table of ~14 cm (6 inches) year over the past 31–32 years… However, recent studies show that in some areas very recently submerged permafrost is close to or has already reached the thaw point,” Ibid.

Shakhova’s studies are based upon marine expeditions, including drill campaigns that investigate the thermal regime, geomorphology, lithology, and geocryology of sediment cores extracted from boreholes drilled from marine vessels and not based solely upon climate models calculated on desktop computers.

In conclusion, as the world community continues to accept the reality of climate change as an existential threat, which fact is emphatically spotlighted by the likes of the Children’s Crusade, originating out of Sweden, and the Extinction Rebellion, originating out of the UK, it is important to emphasize the timing factor. Nobody knows 100% for certain how the climate crisis will turn out, but there is pretty solid evidence that the issue, meaning several ecosystems which are starting to collapse in unison, is accelerating, by a lot. So, there is not much time left to do something constructive, assuming it’s not already too late. Speaking of which, a small faction of climate scientists has already “tossed in the towel.”

After all, it’s not that hard to understand their point of view as many ecosystems have already hit tipping points, which means no turning back, no fixes possible, but still, (and, here’s the great hope) nobody really knows 100% for sure how all of this will play out.

Nevertheless, in a perfect world that really/truly “follows the science” a Worldwide All-In Coordinated Marshall Plan to do “whatever it takes” would already be in a full-blastoff mode.

But… It’s not!

 

Read more:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/20/the-dangerous-methane-mystery/

 

 

Read from top.

BRUSSELS - A push by most European Union nations for the world's biggest economic bloc to go carbon-neutral by 2050 was dropped to a footnote at a summit on Thursday after fierce resistance from Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

France and Germany had led efforts for the 28-member EU to lead by example in setting an ambitious new climate goal ahead of UN climate talks in September that US President Donald Trump has abandoned.

But unanimity was needed, and last-ditch persuasion efforts in what diplomats described as "impassioned" talks that dragged on for four hours failed to ease fears among the central and eastern European states, including Estonia, that it would hurt economies like theirs dependent on nuclear power and coal.

EU leaders called on the European Investment Bank (EIB) to increase climate funding and acknowledged vast differences in the continent's energy mix, but Poland remained unmoved.

"We need concrete things on the table," Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said. "What additional money could be allotted to Poland so that we do not end up in an offside trap?"

In an unusual move that nevertheless sends a strong signal to businesses, 24 of the EU leaders chose instead to reflect support for the mid-century goal as a footnote in their final statement:

"For a large majority of member states, climate neutrality must be achieved by 2050."

 

Read more:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201906/21/WS5d0c3198a3103dbf1432972f.html

 

Read from top.

 BY G. SUPRAN, S. RAHMSTORF, AND N. ORESKES

 

SCIENCEVOL. 379, NO. 6628

 

ASSESSING EXXONMOBIL’S GLOBAL WARMING PROJECTIONS

 

Insider knowledge

For decades, some members of the fossil fuel industry tried to convince the public that a causative link between fossil fuel use and climate warming could not be made because the models used to project warming were too uncertain. Supran et al. show that one of those fossil fuel companies, ExxonMobil, had their own internal models that projected warming trajectories consistent with those forecast by the independent academic and government models. What they understood about climate models thus contradicted what they led the public to believe. —HJS

Structured Abstract

BACKGROUND

In 2015, investigative journalists discovered internal company memos indicating that Exxon oil company has known since the late 1970s that its fossil fuel products could lead to global warming with “dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.” Additional documents then emerged showing that the US oil and gas industry’s largest trade association had likewise known since at least the 1950s, as had the coal industry since at least the 1960s, and electric utilities, Total oil company, and GM and Ford motor companies since at least the 1970s. Scholars and journalists have analyzed the texts contained in these documents, providing qualitative accounts of fossil fuel interests’ knowledge of climate science and its implications. In 2017, for instance, we demonstrated that Exxon’s internal documents, as well as peer-reviewed studies published by Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists, overwhelmingly acknowledged that climate change is real and human-caused. By contrast, the majority of Mobil and ExxonMobil Corp’s public communications promoted doubt on the matter.

ADVANCES

Many of the uncovered fossil fuel industry documents include explicit projections of the amount of warming expected to occur over time in response to rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Yet, these numerical and graphical data have received little attention. Indeed, no one has systematically reviewed climate modeling projections by any fossil fuel interest. What exactly did oil and gas companies know, and how accurate did their knowledge prove to be? Here, we address these questions by reporting and analyzing all known global warming projections documented by—and in many cases modeled by—Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists between 1977 and 2003.

Our results show that in private and academic circles since the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil predicted global warming correctly and skillfully. Using established statistical techniques, we find that 63 to 83% of the climate projections reported by ExxonMobil scientists were accurate in predicting subsequent global warming. ExxonMobil’s average projected warming was 0.20° ± 0.04°C per decade, which is, within uncertainty, the same as that of independent academic and government projections published between 1970 and 2007. The average “skill score” and level of uncertainty of ExxonMobil’s climate models (67 to 75% and ±21%, respectively) were also similar to those of the independent models.

Moreover, we show that ExxonMobil scientists correctly dismissed the possibility of a coming ice age in favor of a “carbon dioxide induced ‘super-interglacial’”; accurately predicted that human-caused global warming would first be detectable in the year 2000 ± 5; and reasonably estimated how much CO2 would lead to dangerous warming.

OUTLOOK

Today, dozens of cities, counties, and states are suing oil and gas companies for their “longstanding internal scientific knowledge of the causes and consequences of climate change and public deception campaigns.” The European Parliament and the US Congress have held hearings, US President Joe Biden has committed to holding fossil fuel companies accountable, and a grassroots social movement has arisen under the moniker #ExxonKnew. Our findings demonstrate that ExxonMobil didn’t just know “something” about global warming decades ago—they knew as much as academic and government scientists knew. But whereas those scientists worked to communicate what they knew, ExxonMobil worked to deny it—including overemphasizing uncertainties, denigrating climate models, mythologizing global cooling, feigning ignorance about the discernibility of human-caused warming, and staying silent about the possibility of stranded fossil fuel assets in a carbon-constrained world.

 

 

In 2015, investigative journalists uncovered internal company documents showing that Exxon scientists have been warning their executives about “potentially catastrophic” anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming since at least 1977 (1, 2). Researchers and journalists have subsequently unearthed additional documents showing that the US oil and gas industry writ large—by way of its trade association, the American Petroleum Institute—has been aware of potential human-caused global warming since at least the 1950s (3); the coal industry since at least the 1960s (4); electric utilities, Total oil company, and General Motors and Ford motor companies since at least the 1970s (5–8); and Shell oil company since at least the 1980s (9).

 

This corpus of fossil fuel documents has attracted widespread scholarly, journalistic, political, and legal attention, leading to the conclusion that the fossil fuel industry has known for decades that their products could cause dangerous global warming. In 2017, we used content analysis to demonstrate that Exxon’s internal documents, as well as peer-reviewed studies authored or coauthored by Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists, overwhelmingly acknowledged that global warming is real and human-caused (10). By contrast, we found that the majority of Mobil and ExxonMobil Corp’s public communications promoted doubt on the matter. Cities, counties, and states have accordingly filed dozens of lawsuits variously accusing ExxonMobil Corp and other companies of deceit and responsibility for climate damages (11). The attorney general of Massachusetts, for instance, alleges that ExxonMobil has had a “long-standing internal scientific knowledge of the causes and consequences of climate change” and waged “public deception campaigns” that misrepresented that knowledge (12). Civil society campaigns seeking to hold fossil fuel interests accountable for allegedly misleading shareholders, customers, and the public about climate science have emerged under monikers such as #ExxonKnew, #ShellKnew, and #TotalKnew (13–15) (see Box 1 for more examples).

 

  

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