|
Post by swamprat on Feb 1, 2019 16:58:09 GMT
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on Feb 1, 2019 21:25:12 GMT
Ha! Karma is indeed the B word! (But most of us Republicans still would not vote for the Hillary.....) US climate costs will be highest in Republican strongholds Districts where politicians have generally opposed climate policies will see the most economic damage this century.
Jeff Tollefson
30 January 2019
The bulk of the economic burden resulting from climate change in the United States this century will fall on Republican strongholds where politicians have traditionally opposed policies to curb greenhouse gases. And as the impacts mount, they could potentially alter the political dynamics, says an analysis released on 29 January by the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington DC.
Researchers compared the projected economic impacts of global warming by the end of the century — including changes in mortality, agricultural yields and coastal damage driven by extreme weather and rising seas, for example — to recent voting patterns across the United States.
They found that vast swaths of the Republican-leaning southwest and southeast could see economic losses of 10–28% by the end of the century (see ‘Geography of impact’). Meanwhile, northern regions that include many Democratic-voting states, will experience fewer impacts and could even benefit from some of the results of climate change, including increases in agricultural yields.
Source: Brookings Institution All told, 15 of the 16 states with the most to lose economically from global warming voted for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016, according to the analysis (see ‘Voting climate’). Trump’s administration has worked aggressively to dismantle climate regulations put in place under former President Barack Obama.
Source: Brookings Institution The US states at most risk are part of a “barricade” that opposes action to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, says co-author David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. “The politics are flipped upside down,” Victor says.
But, he adds, public recognition of the problem could increase as global-warming effects accumulate.
Facts to the rescue
There is some recent evidence that information about climate impacts is already persuading the public. In a poll conducted in December by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 73% of US respondents said they understand that global warming is happening — an increase of ten percentage points since March 2015.
The number of people in the United States who say they have personally experienced the impacts of global warming has increased 15% over the same period, to 46%. And nearly two-thirds think that global warming is affecting the weather, while roughly half say that it made wildfires and/or hurricanes worse in 2018.
Climate change is not immune to the political divisions in the United States, but opinions do change in response to facts and personal experience, says co-author Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the institution. “That is what the new survey data is beginning to show.”
But translating public understanding of the influence of climate change into concrete — and potentially expensive — actions to curb greenhouse gases is a daunting challenge. Climate change remains a relatively low-priority issue among US voters, and the political leadership that is needed to build support for climate policies is missing, says Megan Mullin, a political scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
“People elect leaders, but leaders also affect people’s perceptions,” Mullin says. As long as mainstream politicians refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence on climate change, she says, making progress on meaningful climate policies will be difficult.
Still, Victor says that talking about economic impacts is more likely to persuade conservative voters of the need for action than is talking about environmental concerns. What’s needed, he says, is more scientific evidence that connects the dots between global warming and local costs to taxpayers.
“That’s what makes it all palpable,” he says. “Once you understand the local costs — that tells you what the public needs to do.”
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00327-2
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on Feb 2, 2019 16:33:01 GMT
Lake Michigan Has Completely Frozen Over Amid Dangerous Temperatures — See the Incredible Photos By Helen Murphy
February 1, 2019
Cold Chicago. Scott Olson/Getty Images
Lake Michigan has frozen over as extreme cold weather hit parts of the U.S. this week.
The Midwest, from the Dakotas to Western New York, is experiencing some of the coldest temperatures to hit the region in more than two decades, according to The Weather Channel — and the lake is feeling the effects.
As wind chill temperatures in Chicago dropped as low as -51 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service, parts of Lake Michigan turned to ice.
Source: Coastal Living
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on Feb 2, 2019 17:50:53 GMT
|
|
|
Post by nyx on Feb 6, 2019 23:23:39 GMT
The Met UK issued dire warning.
2018 was the 4 th warmest year, but warns the next five years will make 2018 look like “child’s play”, Yikes!!
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on Feb 20, 2019 21:25:10 GMT
Does NASA have any climate change skeptics? Michelle Thaller
23 November 2018
So your question is how widespread is it within NASA that scientists are convinced that human activity is responsible for climate change? And this is something that is important to say very, very clearly. I have known and worked with hundreds of earth scientists at many different locations in NASA, all of them, all of them believe that human activity is responsible for the current climate change that we see going so fast it's almost unprecedented. I want you to think about that.
One thing that I take really seriously and I'm very proud of is that NASA is not a political organization. We are scientists that work for the American people. We're funded by taxpayer's money. And what we do is we make measurements. We have many, many different satellites that are orbiting the earth right now they're looking at things like ice on the oceans and at the poles, they're looking for things like vegetation growth and the change of that, ocean level, is the ocean level rising? Yeah it turns out that it is. So we have many scientists all over the planet studying all of the different ramifications of climate change. We understand the causes. There actually is no scientific controversy about that. Humans are releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and this is warming our planet.
Now what scientists are researching currently, and they don't all agree about, is what are the most important components of driving climate change. Is it carbon dioxide? Could it be something else like methane? When methane gets released that's an even more powerful greenhouse gas. We don't agree on how quickly things like the ocean level will rise. People have different estimates for how quickly that will happen. So there still is scientific controversy about what the most important aspects of climate change are and how quickly it will go in the future, but there is no scientific disagreement within NASA that humans are causing climate change.
Now I started this off by saying that one of the things I'm very proud of is that NASA is not political. And what that means for me is that I cannot advocate for any specific solution to climate change. That's not my job. That's up to policymakers. People might suggest things like having more solar energy or cutting carbon emissions or things like that, but at NASA we really understand that's not us, that's up to the American people, our leaders and leaders around the world. What we do is provide the facts to everybody on the planet. All of our data is actually free to any government, any person, any scientist all over the world that wants to use it. So we all know what's causing climate change, we can't tell you what to do about it but we can say it's time to do something about it.
(Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit NASA.)
bigthink.com/videos/does-nasa-have-any-climate-change-skeptics
|
|
|
Post by gus on Feb 24, 2019 5:30:53 GMT
"Whats the difference between a 2 degrees celsius and 4 degrees celsius world?" Answer from Prof John Shellnhuber "Human Civilisation"
By 2025 if we do not reverse CO2 we go beyond the tipping point, there is no reversing this! Current models suggest at current levels we are aiming at a 6 degrees celsius.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2019 0:40:05 GMT
Just a thought to ponder. How many Ice ages have we had? I don’t know but at least several. Would you consider an ice age a significant climate change? Of course, you would. Consider further that humans were not around, and if they were in such low numbers that you simply could not attribute a climate change to human activity. So, climate change happened without any human influence. And this was a big change.
|
|
|
Post by moksha on Mar 2, 2019 11:26:31 GMT
Just a thought to ponder. How many Ice ages have we had? I don’t know but at least several. Would you consider an ice age a significant climate change? Of course, you would. Consider further that humans were not around, and if they were in such low numbers that you simply could not attribute a climate change to human activity. So, climate change happened without any human influence. And this was a big change. Very true mrgort, but there is more.
Al the Planets in our Solar System are changing, the TAX collectors might want to TAX Mars Venus and all the others, can't let a crisis go to waste. .
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on Apr 2, 2019 15:22:37 GMT
2018 global CO2 growth 4th highest on record By EarthSky Voices in EARTH | HUMAN WORLD | April 2, 2019
According to NOAA data, global growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2018 was the 4th-highest in 60 years of record-keeping.
Image via HuffPost.
By the end of 2018, NOAA’s atmospheric observatory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, recorded the fourth-highest annual growth in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in 60 years of record-keeping.
Carbon dioxide grew by 2.87 parts per million (ppm) at the mountaintop observatory during 2018, jumping from an average of 407.05 ppm on January 1, 2018, to 409.92 on January 1, 2019, according to a new analysis of air samples collected by NOAA’s Global Monitoring Division (GMD).
That means three of the four highest annual increases have occurred in the past four years, said Pieter Tans, senior scientist with GMD. Tans said:
"At a time when there’s all this talk about how we should be decreasing CO2 emissions, the amount of CO2 we’re putting into the atmosphere is clearly accelerating. It’s no coincidence that the last four years also had the highest CO2 emissions on record."
A chart showing the steadily increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (in parts per million) observed at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory over the course of 60 years. Measurements of the greenhouse gas began in 1959. Image via NOAA.
NOAA captures and analyzes air samples from a network of observatories and collecting stations around the world. Situated close to the top of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory samples “background” samples of Northern Hemisphere air. Mauna Loa is the oldest in the network and has the longest record of CO2 measurements.
The increase observed in 2018 ranks behind only 2016’s record jump of 3.01 ppm, 2015’s near-record increase of 2.98 ppm and 1998’s growth of 2.93 ppm/yr in the modern record. The record dates to March 1958 when David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography started measuring atmospheric CO2 in what’s known as the Keeling Curve.
Globally averaged CO2 levels increased by a similar amount to what was observed on Mauna Loa during 2018.
Carbon dioxide is by far the most important of the five primary greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide and ozone – both in total amount and the rate of increase. When the first Mauna Loa samples were analyzed in 1958, CO2 had already risen 35 ppm from the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm. In the past 60 years, CO2 has increased by an additional 95 ppm to 410 ppm today.
In the last two decades, the rate of increase has been roughly 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred at the end of the last ice age 11,000-17,000 years ago.
Tans said: "Today’s rise of CO2 is dominated by human activities. It’s not from natural causes."
About NOAA greenhouse gas monitoring
NOAA tracks five primary greenhouse gases that warm the planet by trapping heat from Earth’s surface that would otherwise escape into space, including two chlorofluorocarbons controlled by the Montreal Protocol that damage Earth’s ozone layer. All five gases account for about 96 percent of the atmosphere’s increased heat-trapping capacity since 1750, another climate indicator tracked by NOAA.
Bottom line: A NOAA report showed the 4th-highest growth in global atmospheric CO2 in 60 years of record-keeping.
earthsky.org/earth/2018-global-co2-growth-4th-highest-on-record
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on Apr 5, 2019 15:40:25 GMT
Alaska’s mountain glaciers: A 10-year story By EarthSky Voices in EARTH | HUMAN WORLD | April 5, 2019
Glaciers in Alaska are losing ice and contributing to sea level rise. To monitor these changes, a team of researchers has been flying scientific instruments on a bright red, single-engine plane since spring 2009.
By María José Viñas/NASA’s Earth Science News Team
Watch Video: www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=zyG4YlPftxk
In Alaska, five percent of the land is covered by glaciers that are losing a lot of ice and contributing to sea level rise. To monitor these changes, a small team of NASA-funded researchers has been flying scientific instruments on a bright red, single-engine plane since spring 2009.
In almost a decade of operations, the Operation IceBridge Alaska team has more than doubled the number of mountain glaciers surveyed in the state known as “The Last Frontier.” Data from the mission has put numbers to the loss of Alaskan glaciers from 1994 to 2013: 75 gigatons of ice every year. Measurements from the campaign have helped scientists determine that most of the mass loss in Alaska’s icy fields is due to surface melt rather than warming ocean waters.
NASA’s Operation IceBridge airborne science campaigns have been measuring Earth’s changing glaciers and ice sheets since 2009. IceBridge was conceived to avoid a gap in measurements of ice height between two satellite missions: NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), which stopped collecting data in 2009, and its ICESat-2, which launched in 2018. While scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, managed the two larger yearly field campaigns in the Arctic and Antarctica, monitoring Alaskan glaciers fell on a smaller team based at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska.
Chris Larsen is lead scientist for Operation IceBridge Alaska and a research professor at University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Larsen said:
"NASA wanted to find existing systems that were capable of doing these measurements from airplanes and get them going right away. University of Alaska Fairbanks had an ongoing altimetry program since 1991 and a system that was flight-ready – so we were good to go and started our flights in May 2009."
Challenging mountain flights
Equal in size to six Yellowstone National Parks, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in southeastern Alaska is the largest national park in the United States. The remote site offers breathtaking views of extensive boreal forest, braided glacial rivers and towering mountains – and also provides optimal access to many of the main icefields in the region.
Sitting in the middle of the park, hundreds of miles away from the closest paved road, is a lodge that doubles as IceBridge Alaska’s main base of operations. From there, Larsen’s team conducts two flight campaigns every year: one at the end of the accumulation season, in May, and another toward the end of the melt season, in August. Larsen said:
"Both melt and ice flow both occur at much faster rates in general here than they do in Greenland and Antarctica. The difference between a glacier in May and that same glacier in August is huge."
Since the beginning of the mission, Larsen has used a laser altimeter – an instrument that fires pulses of light and times how long they take to bounce off the ice and return to the sensors – to measure changes in the surface of the ice. In 2012, he added a radar sounder to examine the bedrock beneath mountain glaciers – scientists are keen on measuring the topography near the terminus, or end, of a glacier because it often determines the glacier’s behavior.
But radar, it turns out, is tricky to use with Alaska’s mountain glaciers.
Martin Truffer is an expert in ice physics at University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and IceBridge Alaska’s co-principal investigator. He said:
"It can be really hard to get the radar energy all the way to the bed of the glacier – it’s actually a much harder problem than I thought when I first started."
Most glaciers in Alaska are temperate, meaning they are at their melting point from surface to base and contain large pockets of water within the ice that scatter radar waves. To further complicate things, the tall mountains encasing the narrow glacier valleys reflect radar waves as frequently as the bedrock does. This muddles the signal and makes it challenging for scientists to define the glacier’s base. Truffer said:
"Radar energy just comes back from everywhere, from the mountains all around the plane, and then we have to decipher what’s coming from the glacier bed. There used to be these solar hotdog cookers, made of this U-shaped mirror that would focus all the sunlight on the hotdog. It turns out that our airplane is often where the hotdog would be."
A tale of three glaciers
On a bright morning on August 17, 2018, Larsen, Truffer and University of Texas undergraduate student Michael Christoffersen were ready to launch their summer campaign of science flights. The IceBridge scientists and their instruments would be traveling aboard their usual ride: a bright red, single-engine De Havilland Otter.
The Otter belongs to Paul Claus, a bush pilot who’s logged more than 35,000 flight hours, mostly in the wilderness. Claus hand-flies all of IceBridge’s data collection lines along Alaskan glaciers, because said paths are often meandering and close to ridge lines, which does not allow for autopilot. Claus’s intimate knowledge of Alaska’s tricky mountain weather is priceless for the mission’s safety and efficiency. Larsen, who is himself a commercial pilot who assists in the cockpit during flight, said:
"Whenever a problem comes up, Paul has already been through it or knows how to get around it and often before it happens because he can see it coming."
Larsen was moderately optimistic about the day’s forecast. He said:
"The weather looks like it’s going to be good for us, but you can get the best forecast in the world for this region and still get out there and have it be totally different. We won’t know until we check it out. Paul and I have a saying: It’s easy when it’s easy, and I’m hoping we’ll get to say that today."
The day’s goals included flying over three glaciers that, though relatively close by, exhibit different behaviors – something very common among Alaskan glaciers.
One of the first targets was Yahtse Glacier, a tidewater glacier. These types of glaciers sit on deep water and have a built-in cyclicity: they naturally alternate between advancement and retreat. And currently, Yahtse is the most rapidly advancing glacier of its type in Alaska.
Soon afterward, the Otter flew over other glaciers along Icy Bay, a breathtaking body of water in southeast Alaska that presents one of the greatest coastal reliefs (difference between the highest and lowest elevation) in the world. Only a century ago, the now open waters were covered in ice.
Among the final targets of the day was Malaspina Glacier. Malaspina is North America’s largest piedmont glacier: a confluence of large valley glaciers that meet to form an almost stagnant lobe crisscrossed by psychedelic patterns of sediments. The glacier, so huge it’s visible from space, is thinning at the state-wide average of 2.3 feet (.7 meters) per year. But its massive ablation zone makes it vulnerable to future warming. Larsen said:
"Malaspina has the potential for being one of the bigger geographic evolutions in Alaska of our time. Certainly, my son could be able to witness some big geography changes there, as it could open up a large lake or bay."
With a dozen glaciers surveyed on August 17, the inaugural flight of IceBridge Alaska’s summer campaign was a success. Later on, an atmospheric river drove a lot of rain to southeast Alaska, grounding Larsen’s team for several days – still, they managed to complete 50 hours of science flights. Larsen said:
"August can be this way in Alaska. Our May campaign is generally better weather and more stable at that. We didn’t get it this year, but in years past it’s been wonderful – then the world is your oyster and you can choose where you want to go based on the scientific priorities."
The following month, on September 15, 2018, NASA’s ICESat-2 launched and the gap in measurements of ice height in the polar regions was finally bridged. Larsen expects the new spacecraft to perform well with mountain glaciers. Larsen said:
"What is great about ICESat-2 is that it has multiple laser beams, so each pass of the satellite in effect covers multiple ground tracks – and this will help with smaller targets, such as Alaskan glaciers."
Larsen will continue to carry on IceBridge Alaska flights until summer 2020 and thus contribute to the validation of the new satellite’s measurements of ice height in the region.
Bottom line: Flying low over some of the most dramatic landscapes on the planet, a cadre of scientists and pilots have been measuring changes in Alaskan glaciers as part of NASA’s Operation IceBridge for almost a decade. The team has seen significant change in ice extent and thickness over that time.
earthsky.org/earth/alaska-mountain-glaciers-icebridge-video
|
|
|
Post by moksha on Apr 6, 2019 11:05:23 GMT
I found this very interesting.
ENJOY while you can. .
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on Apr 9, 2019 15:32:14 GMT
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on May 15, 2019 15:05:39 GMT
The REAL "New Green Deal"? Bill Nye Brings Out the F-Bombs and a Blowtorch to Talk Climate Change By Elizabeth Howell 17 hours ago Science & Astronomy
Science popularizer Bill Nye told viewers of a popular late-night show that Earth is "on [expletive] fire" while lighting a globe with a blowtorch.
During his appearance on HBO's "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver" on Sunday (May 12), Nye used frank language to talk to millennials about the impacts of global warming on Earth. (Nye's comments are heavily edited here for language; viewer discretion is advised if you watch the video.)
Watch 20 minute VIDEO: www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=JDcro7dPqpA
"By the end of this century, if temperatures keep rising, the average temperature on Earth could go up another 4 to 8 degrees," Nye said to Oliver. (Nye was referring to degrees Celsius; the equivalent change in Fahrenheit is roughly 7 to 14 degrees). "What I'm saying is, the planet's on [expletive] fire."
He explained that addressing climate change means making tough choices in our daily lives to reduce carbon emissions, which are caused by activities such as driving vehicles or burning coal. These emissions produce greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere — warming the planet up, causing ocean levels to rise as glaciers melt, and increasing the severity of hurricanes and storms.
Nye, adding a few more expletives in his explanation, said none of these options to address global warming come free. So, he urged his viewers to grow up and make tough choices. "I didn't mind explaining photosynthesis to you when you were 12, but you're adults now. This is an actual crisis — got it?"
Oliver ended the segment by telling the audience that he was "absolutely onboard" with Nye's "gritty reboot."
Nye is best known for more family-friendly content, such as PBS's "Bill Nye the Science Guy" in the 1990s and, more recently, the Netflix series "Bill Nye Saves the World." He also is CEO of The Planetary Society, an advocacy group that promotes space exploration.
www.space.com/bill-nye-climate-change-john-oliver.html
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on May 23, 2019 17:06:51 GMT
How Dead Aliens Could Help Save Humanity By Mike Wall
May 23, 2019
It might take a dramatic extinction example to put us on the right path.
Artist's illustration of advanced aliens. (Image: © Albert Ziganshin / Shutterstock.com)
Those who don't learn the lessons of an extinct alien civilization's fall may be doomed to repeat it.
Humanity appears to be going down a dangerous path. We've developed weapons powerful enough to off ourselves many times over, for example, and we've been altering Earth's climate for decades without much regard for the serious consequences.
Similar behavior may have led to the demise of advanced alien races around the galaxy, said Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard's astronomy department. Indeed, this might help explain, at least in part, why we have yet to make contact with ET despite the profusion of habitable real estate in the Milky Way (a puzzle known as the Fermi paradox).
"One possibility is that these civilizations, based on the way we behave, are short-lived," Loeb said last week during a talk at The Humans to Mars Summit in Washington, D.C. "They think short term, and they produce self-inflicted wounds that eventually kill them."
So, the hunt for ET should be wide-ranging enough to spy artifacts left behind by vanished civilizations, he added — evidence such as burned-up planetary surfaces and products of nuclear war swirling in an alien world's air.
Such a find would perhaps be the greatest scientific discovery of all time, and it might have the added benefit of putting our troubled species on a better path.
"The idea is we may learn something in the process," Loeb said. "We may learn to better behave with each other, not to initiate a nuclear war, or to monitor our planet and make sure that it's habitable for as long as we can make it habitable."
There are other practical justifications for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) as well, Loeb said. For example, making contact could lead to huge technological breakthroughs — if the aliens were kind enough to share their knowledge.
"Our technology is only a century old, but if another civilization had a billion years to develop space travel, they may teach us how to do it," Loeb said.
This possibility is another reason to continue pushing for interstellar-flight technology, he added. Loeb is involved in this field; he chairs the advisory board for Breakthrough Starshot, a $100 million project to develop tiny laser-sailing probes that could zoom toward exoplanetary systems at 20% the speed of light.
Breakthrough Starshot aims to have such a system up and running in 30 years or so. If this effort, or something like it, is successful, intelligent aliens may regard us in a new light — as relative peers worthy of attention and respect, Loeb said.
"My hope is that finding dead civilizations will inspire us to behave better and get our act together," he said. "And another hope that I have is that, once we exit from the solar system, we will receive a message back: 'Welcome to the interstellar club.' And we will figure out that there's a lot of traffic out there that we were not aware of."
We may have already gotten a glimpse of this traffic, Loeb said. He co-authored a paper recently suggesting that 'Oumuamua, the first confirmed interstellar object ever spotted in our solar system, might be an alien spacecraft.
The consensus view is that 'Oumuamua is a cometary body. But it's important not to dismiss the spacecraft idea out of hand, Loeb stressed.
"We should keep an open mind and not presume we know the answer in advance," he said. "You don’t need to pretend that you know something."
www.space.com/dead-intelligent-aliens-save-humanity.html
|
|