Climate Change: Propaganda Vs Reality

panduranghari · Post by **panduranghari** » 03 Dec 2016 21:58

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016 ... shrinking/

Scott and Shackleton logbooks prove Antarctic sea ice is not shrinking 100 years after expeditions

Antarctic sea ice had barely changed from where it was 100 years ago, scientists have discovered, after poring over the logbooks of great polar explorers such as Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton.

Experts were concerned that ice at the South Pole had declined significantly since the 1950s, which they feared was driven by man-made climate change.

But new analysis suggests that conditions are now virtually identical to when the Terra Nova and Endurance sailed to the continent in the early 1900s, indicating that declines are part of a natural cycle and not the result of global warming.
< snip>

"We know that sea ice in the Antarctic has increased slightly over the past 30 years, since satellite observations began. Scientists have been grappling to understand this trend in the context of global warming, but these new findings suggest it may not be anything new.

"If ice levels were as low a century ago as estimated in this research, then a similar increase may have occurred between then and the middle of the century, when previous studies suggest ice levels were far higher."

Neshant · Post by **Neshant** » 04 Dec 2016 11:44

You can tell the man made global warming claim is a load of BS when they try to rush through binding treaties with half-assed science.

You don't need to rush through Einstein's theory of relativity nor Newtonian laws of motion for large objects or any factual theory through any committee of bureaucrats. No solid theory needs any media hype or propaganda to be universally accepted as fact. That's because proving such theories even when tested under a myriad of circumstances is never been a problem. It holds consistent across centuries.

Only when science becomes corrupted with a political & economic agenda does the scientific method go out the window. When global warming "scientists" find they have tied their entire career & entire source of funding to a theory that cannot after decades & billions of dollars show validity, they start to panic.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 12 Dec 2016 20:19

A Tibetan glacier mysteriously collapsed and killed 9. Now researchers offer answers.

More than 100 yaks perished, as did 350 sheep. NASA, which documented the debris field via satellite, described the collapse as one of the largest recorded avalanches in history.

The collapse, at first, left climatologists perplexed. But now an international team of scientists has found the most likely culprit: an unusual slick of meltwater beneath the glacier, created by unusually warm temperatures.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 12 Dec 2016 21:58

Ice loss spreads up Antarctic glaciers

The scale and pace of change now taking place in West Antarctica is captured in a new, long-term satellite record.

Scientists have combined nearly a quarter of a century of observations to show how the region's great glaciers are losing height by up to 7m per year.

The satellite data also traces the way this thinning behaviour has spread up the length of the ice streams.
The glaciers concerned all terminate in the Amundsen Sea and are significant contributors to global ocean rise.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 13 Dec 2016 07:25

This stunning Antarctic lake is buried in ice. And that could be bad news

Atop the ice sheet covering the Arctic island of Greenland, you now see dramatic melting in the summer. It forms lakes, rivers and even dangerous “moulins” in the ice where rivers suddenly plunge into the thick ice sheet, carrying water deep below.

East Antarctica is supposed to be different. It is extremely remote and cold. It doesn’t see such warm temperatures in the summer — yet — and so its ice tends to remain more pristine.

“Many people refer to East Antarctica as being too cold for significant melt,” says Jan Lenaerts, a glaciologist with the Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “I mean there’s marginal melt in summer, but there’s not a lot.”

[Shrinking mountain glaciers are ‘categorical evidence’ of climate change, scientists say]

That’s the common wisdom, at least, but it is challenged in a new study in Nature Climate Change, by Lenaerts and his colleagues from universities in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. They do so based on research they conducted atop the very large Roi Baudouin ice shelf in East Antarctica, which floats atop the ocean, and where they found a very Greenland-like situation in early 2016.

The researchers had traveled to investigate what had been described as a nearly 2 mile wide “crater” in the shelf, glimpsed by satellite, which some sources believed had been caused by a meteorite. To the contrary, they found that it was a large, 10 foot deep, icy lake bed. In its center, meanwhile, were multiple rivers and three moulins that carried water deep down into the floating ice shelf.

And even this, perhaps, was not the most dramatic finding. The researchers also drilled through the ice and found what they called “englacial” lakes, sandwiched between the surface of the ice shelf and its base, which is in contact with the ocean beneath it. They found 55 lakes in total on or in the ice shelf, and a number of them were in this buried, englacial format. The video of one such discovery, of a crystal blue lake four meters below the ice shelf surface, is shown above, and an image from the video is below:

This meant that the ice shelf is anything but solid — it had many large pockets of weakness throughout its structure, suggesting a greater potential vulnerability to collapse through a process called “hydrofracturing,” especially if lake formation continues or increases. That’s bad news because when ice shelves fall apart, the glacial ice behind them flows more rapidly to the ocean, raising sea levels.

But why was all this happening, and here?

The researchers postulate that a “microclimate” exists on the ice shelf that made it all possible — and that a similar mechanism is operating on other East Antarctic ice shelves. Here’s what they believe happens to create so much wetness and melt:

In East Antarctica, so-called “katabatic” winds blow downhill from higher reaches of the ice sheet toward the sea. These powerful winds scour the surface and lift off all the snow, exposing blue ice beneath. At the same time, they mix with warmer air higher in the atmosphere and pull it downward. (In this part of Antarctica there is a temperature “inversion” with cooler winds near the surface and warmer air aloft.)

This has a double melting effect: The warmth raises temperatures atop the ice, even as the exposure of the blue ice reduces the “albedo,” or reflectivity, of the surface, meaning that more sunlight gets absorbed. The result is a pocket of melt in the form of a lake and in some cases the pouring of water into the ice shelf.

As for the submerged lakes, these appear to form from surface lakes that freeze over on top in winter, but stay liquid beneath, Lenaerts said. Then subsequent layers of snow may bury them, even as the steady flow of the glacier into the ice shelf carries them out further over the ocean.

Indeed, it turns out that the further out over the ocean you go, the deeper the lakes tended to occur, presumably due to this flow and burial process. The lake in the video above is four meters below the ice surface, but “we have found one 8 meters below the surface even further, and one 15 meters below the surface, even further,” Lenaerts said.

As for the plunging moulins, where that water ends up remains mysterious. But it does not appear to be feeding the buried lakes. “We don’t have the tools, the instrumentation, to detect this right now. This is a really big unknown,” Lenaerts said. The water could even be traveling all the way through the ice shelf and pouring into the ocean.

Importantly, the researchers went to satellite images to show that what’s happening on the Roi Baudouin ice shelf isn’t unique to East Antarctica. Rather, they say, they have seen similar features atop other nearby East Antarctic ice shelves, at least remotely.

“We see similar things going on on neighboring ice shelves, and also for instance on the Amery ice shelf, which is also a notorious, very large ice shelf on East Antarctica,” Lenaerts said. “We see this link between strong winds and blue ice formation, enhanced absorption of solar radiation, and the melt that is enhanced by this process.”

The researchers are not saying, to be sure, that these processes are caused by human-induced climate change — they note in particular that on the Roi Baudouin shelf, it appears that there has been some melting at the surface since the 1980s. However, Lenaerts said it is already clear that there is much more meltwater during warmer summers than in cooler ones. And global warming will gradually produce warmer Antarctic temperatures, which should increase the volume of meltwater atop of these ice shelves, pushing them still further in the Greenland direction.

What this means is that the shelves could be subject to the risk of what researchers call “hydro-fracturing”: When a great deal of meltwater forms atop the shelf and pushes inside of it, eventually leading to a crackup. That’s what’s believed to have happened in the classic case of the shattering of the Larsen B ice shelf in the Antarctic peninsula in 2002. Now the fear is that it could happen in the East Antarctic, too, where there is a massive amount of ice to potentially lose.

“If this region can get warmer in the future, the meltwater production will enhance a lot, and we can only expect these features, these processes to be more present than they are now,” said Lenaerts said. “With potential implications for hydrofacturing to happen and for ice shelf stability.”

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 13 Dec 2016 08:49

NRao wrote:Ice loss spreads up Antarctic glaciers

The scale and pace of change now taking place in West Antarctica is captured in a new, long-term satellite record.

Scientists have combined nearly a quarter of a century of observations to show how the region's great glaciers are losing height by up to 7m per year.

The satellite data also traces the way this thinning behaviour has spread up the length of the ice streams.
The glaciers concerned all terminate in the Amundsen Sea and are significant contributors to global ocean rise.

It is only speculated that this is global warming. If particulate emissions are significantly brought down, then albedo would increase and the energy absorbed on the surface of the ice would be lower. We should all work on lowering particulate emissions rather than this wild goose chase of global warming.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 13 Dec 2016 09:08

Particulates in Antarctica.

Trump studing global warming.

And now this

Interesting times, to say the very least.

No idea why Al Gore even dreamt of the internet. He has fathered too many intellectual orphans.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 13 Dec 2016 16:20

Offshore wind, which Trump fought in Scotland, is finally up and running in the U.S.

The Block Island Wind Farm, a 30 megawatt (or 30 million-watt) installment off the Rhode Island coast, went into regular operation Monday — marking the beginning of a bona fide new source of electricity in the United States. Although countries such as Britain and China have many of them, this is the first fully operational U.S. offshore wind-farm installment.

It comes just after the election of Donald Trump, who has tried to stop an offshore wind farm that he said obscured the view from one of his Scottish golf courses, and as the Trump transition team at the Energy Department posed a controversial list of 74 questions to the agency, including the following: “What is the Department’s role with respect to the development of offshore wind?”

According to the New York Times, Trump, shortly after his election, spoke with British politician Nigel Farage and “encouraged Mr. Farage and his entourage to oppose the kind of offshore wind farms that Mr. Trump believes will mar the pristine view from one of his two Scottish golf courses.”

The Block Island project consists of five large offshore turbines supplied by GE Renewable Energy and is operated by Deepwater Wind. It drew some local resistance — including complaints about views — but has the backing of Rhode Island’s governor, Gina M. Raimondo.

On Block Island itself, which has about 1,000 full-time residents who have relied on diesel generators, some residents said not only that the turbines damaged the view but that the resulting electricity would be too pricey. Others supported the installation.

“We’ve been running on diesel generators for 80 years,” Norris Pik told The Washington Post earlier this year. “It’s time to turn them off.”

Deepwater Wind’s chief executive, Jeff Grybowski, said in an interview with The Post: “Taking offshore wind from a theoretical thing to a reality is what Block Island has done. As the first project to cross the finish line, it’s really proven that offshore wind can be done in the United States. It has proven that the industry — and Deepwater as a company — can do what we say we can do.”

He said that on an annual basis, the five turbines off Block Island should be able to produce enough electricity to power about 17,000 households. The company already is working on a 90-megawatt project, to be located off the east end of Long Island, that Grybowski said could be operational in about five years and would be the nation’s second offshore wind farm. Deepwater is also one of multiple companies that have proposed a project about 17 miles off the shore of Ocean City, Md.

Grybowski said he doesn’t worry that a Trump administration would do much to upend the growth of offshore wind power.

“Our business is driven principally by what is happening in very individual markets,” he said. “It’s not driven very much by national policy.”

He acknowledged that any company hoping to build turbines offshore needs an array of state and federal permitting approvals. But he said traditionally that has been more of a legal process than one dictated by politics. “I don’t worry about our ability to get through that process,” he said.

And yet it does appear that an unsympathetic administration could pose some hurdles. How do we know? Just ask the gung-ho Obama administration.

The administration recently published a national strategy to advance the industry, a joint document by the Energy and Interior departments. That document noted that it would be particularly important to ensure “efficiency, consistency and clarity in the regulatory process” for offshore wind, overseen by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management at the Interior Department. That department will soon be in the Trump administration’s hands.

“Further work can be done to improve consistency and identify and reduce unnecessary burdens in BOEM’s existing regulatory process,” noted the Obama national strategy for offshore wind. “This may include establishing more predictable review timelines and maintaining a reasonable level of flexibility given the early stage of the industry’s development.”

There are 10 other “active commercial leases” for U.S. offshore wind projects, according to the Energy and Interior departments’ report. The Energy Department, under Obama, forecast that by 2050, the United States could see 86 gigawatts (or 86 billion watts) of offshore wind capacity installed.

Onshore wind is already a booming industry in the country, providing about 5 percent of the nation’s electricity. Trump has been critical of this energy source as well, saying wind turbines “kill all the birds.” Fact checkers have pointed out that while birds are killed by wind turbines, they face a much greater threat from cats and from flying into buildings.

panduranghari · Post by **panduranghari** » 13 Dec 2016 16:32

Neshant wrote:You can tell the man made global warming claim is a load of BS when they try to rush through binding treaties with half-assed science.

Gore started it after he lost the bid to be President. From 1992 until 2000, he portrayed himself to be shoe in. And he lost. Not dissimilar to Hillary. Now Hillary and her cronies will push for the climate change nonsense. Except the noise to get shriller.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 13 Dec 2016 16:32

While at it .........

U.S. Electricity Sales Dropped In 2015 For Fifth Time In 8 Years

Not consumption.

Efficiency Is A Driving Force Behind Flat Electricity Demand
The central question: Why have U.S. electricity sales been virtually flat for a decade, while demand rose at a 2.4 percent annual growth rate in the 1990s? Total U.S. electricity sales in 2015 were actually lower than 2007 sales. During that time, industrial consumption declined, while both residential and commercial electricity consumption were virtually flat “despite growth in the number of households and growth in commercial building space.”

The EIA explains that “Electricity-intensive industries have grown at about the same pace as the rest of the industrial sector, and efficiency improvements in these industries have contributed to declining electricity sales to industry.” A key point is that industrial production in 2015 was roughly at 2007 levels while industrial electricity demand is down some 7 percent.

As for the commercial sector, EIA notes “Standards to improve efficiency for major end uses such as lighting and space conditioning equipment have helped to moderate growing commercial building energy demand as electricity demanded for ventilation and data center servers has increased.” Flat demand in an economy driven by soaring usage of the internet and IT equipment may seem especially unexpected — but as I wrote in a 1999 analysis, a true Internet-based economy was always likely to be more efficient.

The residential sector is the single biggest consumer of electricity, accounting for nearly 38 percent of total use between 2007 and 2015. On the one hand, EIA notes “The 2008–09 recession slowed new-household formation and resulting electricity demand.” On the other hand, “The continued population shift to the South and West has implications for space heating, as electricity is a more common space heating fuel in the South and West,” and it “has implications for air conditioning, as the buildings in these warmer climates require more cooling.” Efficiency measures, such as the phase-out of inefficient light bulbs that started in 2012, made the difference.

“Some improvements in energy efficiency have been market driven, reflecting the interest of consumers and businesses in reducing their electricity consumption and expenditures,” explains the EIA. “Other improvements, mainly related to electricity use in homes and commercial buildings, have been driven by federal and state policies.”
How State And Federal Policies Gave Us An Efficiency Revolution

The key federal policies include energy efficiency standards for a variety of home appliances, commercial-sector equipment, and lighting. I discussed the state policies driving efficiency in my post on the BNEF Sustainable Energy Factbook. I’ll briefly summarize that here since this story remains so unheralded by the media.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 13 Dec 2016 20:03

New NASA imagery shows how fast glaciers are melting

(CNN)They may appear frozen and immovable, but glaciers, which contain some 69% of the world's freshwater, are slowly slipping into the sea.

A new NASA project is tracking the movement of glaciers and ice sheets to show how fast they are melting, and predict what effects this may have on global sea levels and climate.

Working in conjunction with the US Geological Survey and several universities to analyze satellite data, NASA's Global Land Ice Velocity Extraction (GoLIVE) project is able to provide a "near-real-time view of every large glacier and ice sheet on Earth."

The texture on the surface of flowing ice, such as Heimdal Glacier in southern Greenland, allows NASA to map nearly all the flowing ice in the world.

The data will enable researchers to understand what effect atmosphere and ocean conditions have on ice sheets and how that changes how much ice is flowing into the ocean.

"We can use the method to identify which areas to keep an eye on, or which events might lead to a rapid change," Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a statement.

Rising sea levels

In November, sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic was at record low levels for this time of year due to climate change. The more the ice melts, the higher global sea levels will rise.

Sea levels rose faster in the 20th century than the previous 2,700 years, according to a Rutgers University study. Up to 216 million people worldwide are at risk of losing their homes due to rising sea levels.

Last year, NASA said the world is already locked into a sea level rise of around 1 meter (3 feet), if not more, surpassing projections from a few years earlier.
What sea level rise will look like?

What sea level rise will look like? 02:38

Keeping track

"By measuring ice flow all the time, we can identify a surge as it starts, providing an entirely new way to follow this phenomenon," scientist Mark Fahnestock of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said in a statement.
"We can also follow large seasonal swings in tidewater glaciers, as they respond to their environment."

Parts of Mumbai would be submerged if the temperature went up by two degrees.

Much more would be submerged in Mumbai, if temperatures rose by four degrees.

Twila Moon of the University of Bristol added that by mapping what happens to the glacier speed during seasonal shifts in temperature, scientists will be able to extrapolate the effects on the ice as global temperatures continue to rise.

Studying the glacier flow should enable scientists to estimate how much new ice and water is entering the ocean, and what effects it will have both globally and locally.

"The question is, how sensitive are these ice sheets to changes in the atmosphere and the ocean?" Alex Gardner, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement. "We could wait and see, or we could look to the past to help inform what is most likely to happen in the future."

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 13 Dec 2016 21:34

^^^Again. Particulate emissions reduction is the key here. Once these particles get carried in to the upper atmosphere, they can spread everywhere.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 13 Dec 2016 22:05

^^^^^

Internet confusion for you.

"Particulates" from "emissions" are always localized. Have been for decades. "Particulates" are heavy, relative to other matters and therefore rarely get carried by any circulatory mechanism. Besides there is not enough "particulates" to go around the globe - most, if not all , fall to the ground right away.

Diesel fumes are particulates (which fall to the ground), unlike gasoline or petrol, which are gases (and can get carried by winds).

That since 1960s.

Just to round up, another internet myth, Al Gore started global warming. A TRUE

, if there was one. Nope. If existed even in the late 50s. When most such posters parents were just about born.

Internet is being abused very badly. Not false news, but very badly distorted science.

Nothing on climate change has changed except more accurate and a lot more data. NOAA collects 17 terabytes a day.

(I suspect you mean "dust". But then dust does not go to the poles. If it did there would be no poles.)

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 13 Dec 2016 22:15

And even if they are "particulates emissions", then it is man made. So climate changes, such as these, are man made.

I agree.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 14 Dec 2016 01:16

^^^^You'll be surprised what gets up into the stratosphere.

Glaciers melting ≠ global warming. Two different issues.

It isn't just NOAA collecting data, but NASA has been doing this with its Earth Observing Satellites (EOS) since the late 1980s. We also need to look at solar activity which is at a historic low and has yielded cold temperatures in the norther hemisphere as of late. Climate change is a complex problem involving multiple disciplines in astrophysics, geophysics, upper atmospheric physics, and meterology. No one group can know it all and all of the vested interests have done a big disservice to the problem by politicizing it and cramming it down our throats. We need plentiful cheap energy first and foremost.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 14 Dec 2016 02:00

When specifics don't work, generalize it.

. Ok. Get it.

So how exactly do "particulate emissions" get into the stratosphere and why do they only land on glaciers? And not land somewhere else?

Glaciers melting ≠ global warming. Two different issues.

Ok. Good. For the second time we agree. Global warming causes glacier melts. And global warming is man made. Thanks.

I must admit, discussions on the internet are very difficult. Al Gore made a bad invention.

Anyways. ............

Good fun.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 14 Dec 2016 02:21

^^^You know full well the internet came about before Al Gore with US defense research.

I guess you missed the not equal sign. So we agree to disagree. But anyway what would a couple of EEs like us know anyway?

Mu-meson emissions get into the upper atmosphere don't you get it?

Neshant · Post by **Neshant** » 14 Dec 2016 09:18

interesting...

Surface temperatures are actually declining and quite sharply.
Kind of throws a monkey's wrench into to global warming.

Is it now global cooling?

--------

Earth's Surface Temperature Plunge - the Great Pause continues

Last year's El Nino phenomenon temporarily provided succor to climate alarmists, who were increasingly bothered by the "Great Pause" - the fact that the tiny amount of warming experienced since the last cooling cycle ended in the late 1970s had apparently stopped. Despite trace amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere continuing to climb, mother nature decided to disobey alarmist models and temperature went sideways for about 20 years (or even longer, depending on the data set).

A raft of excuses was offered for this decidedly non-hockey stick behavior - by November 2014, there were 66 different "explanations" to choose from.

As a reminder: not a single alarmist prediction on the climate has come true - it is a forecasting record completely unblemished by success for decades. Not even economists are that bad.

Last year the alarmists were bailed out by the El Nino phenomenon though an extremely strong El Nino struck, quite possibly the strongest since records began.

Newspaper headlines were blaring that we had just experienced the "hottest year ever" (note that the term "ever" is highly inappropriate in this context - for most of the past 10000 years temperatures were far warmer than today). Very few of these
alarmists articles mentioned El Nino. There seemed to be a sense of great relief though - the great pause was over!

Alas El Nino tends to be followed by La Nina. And this year, the steepest drop in global surface temperatures since satellite measurements began has taken place - surface temperatures have plunged by more than 1 degree centigratde. (surely
you remember all the breathless headlines in the mainstream media about that. No?) Note that we may still get headlines about 2016 being the "hottest year ever" though. It takes time for this massive cooling to affect the oceans, so sea temperatures will decline with a delay.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-1 ... comes-next

Neshant · Post by **Neshant** » 14 Dec 2016 09:34

panduranghari wrote:Gore started it after he lost the bid to be President.

Al Gore became a billionaire off "green" industries, movies, books, and for all we know back door "consulting" (better known as bribes) from industry. He's living proof that the global warming gravy train can be a road to untold riches. The guy literally owns his own private jet.

This is one of the reasons politicians, banksters & corporations, global warming "scientists" and other vested interests are eager to get in on green anything. There is a shit load of money to be milked out of taxpayers through green jobs, carbon taxes, research grants and other boon doggles where the science is warped to fit the agenda. The agenda being the fleecing of society.

Al Gore, a career “public servant”, reportedly became a billionaire just a few years after leaving his last government job as vice president of the United States.

He achieved this miracle, according to news reports, through various “green” business deals. Such deals are always proprietary and few details about them ever become public. They usually involve the ancient mercantilist practice of bribing politicians for a special favor or subsidy. The bribe-giver becomes wealthy, and the politicians granting the favor/subsidy have the funds to finance the next campaign. Let’s call it crony environmentalism.

http://www.infowars.com/how-al-gore-bec ... llionaire/

Rammpal · Post by **Rammpal** » 14 Dec 2016 09:52

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-t ... SKBN1421V0

"....Andrew Rosenberg, an official at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the Energy Department "made the right choice in refusing this absurd and dangerous request. Federal agencies need the best available science to respond to the growing risk of climate change."

Yet another truckload of corny crap !!

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 14 Dec 2016 10:10

Neshant wrote:This is one of the reasons politicians, banksters & corporations, global warming "scientists" and other vested interests are eager to get in on green anything. There is a shit load of money to be milked out of taxpayers through green jobs, carbon taxes, research grants and other boon doggles where the science is warped to fit the agenda. The agenda being the fleecing of society.

The other person who knows global warming is the gravy train is the US SoS candidate T.Rex. Why should Al Gore and his cronies laugh all the way to the bank? Others are gonna do the same.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 14 Dec 2016 20:31

Arctic heating up at twice as fast as rest of globe

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 14 Dec 2016 23:13

^^^Most of the data that NOAA collects is sounding and satellite data for weather prediction by the National Weather Service. The arctic sea ice melting may not be related to global warming, but part of a natural cycle.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 15 Dec 2016 06:22

POLITICS
Jerry Brown Blasts Donald Trump’s Proposed Attack On Climate Science: ‘We’re Ready To Fight’
“If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jer ... 009eb52598

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 15 Dec 2016 06:31

SaiK wrote:POLITICS
Jerry Brown Blasts Donald Trump’s Proposed Attack On Climate Science: ‘We’re Ready To Fight’
“If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jer ... 009eb52598

It is turning into a serious battle, with scientists downloading data fearing Trump will delete all of it. Trump's transition team has requested the names of people who had participated in the Paris accord.

We are entering a very dangerous phase.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 15 Dec 2016 06:58

https://www.google.com/amp/www.cbc.ca/a ... oid-att-us

The University of Toronto and other academic institutions are participating in an event to archive climate and environmental data before president-elect Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20. (Shutterstock)

He's called climate change a hoax invented by the Chinese. He's nominated a climate-change denier to head the Environmental Protection Agency. And he doesn't believe California is in a drought.

Man, this is going to be fun.

Now all we need is a very nice crash. Housing, auto,......

Rammpal · Post by **Rammpal** » 15 Dec 2016 12:58

NRao wrote:
Now all we need is a very nice crash. Housing, auto,......

...and one may just be around the corner, someplace in Beijing !

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-t ... SKBN1440AB

DT, you Are living in interesting times !!!

And , is that even a curse ?!!

Rammpal · Post by **Rammpal** » 15 Dec 2016 13:01

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-t ... SKBN1440AB

"U.S. to give 30-year wind farm permits; thousands of eagle deaths seen..."

Well, make up your mind, folks.

Is it gonna be eagles or polar ice caps?

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 15 Dec 2016 13:47

The 350+ Islands Set to Disappear

Rammpal · Post by **Rammpal** » 15 Dec 2016 13:51

^^^Great opportunity for i)land reclamation contractors, ii)On-stilt hotel projects.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 16 Dec 2016 22:02

A_Gupta wrote:Animation showing changes in climatic zones used by gardeners in the USA:
https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 16 Dec 2016 23:24

Rammpal wrote:^^^Great opportunity for i)land reclamation contractors, ii)On-stilt hotel projects.

Just as a data point.

A meter rise in sea level would displace about 30 million (of 156 million) in BD, with a loss of 15% of land mass.

That along with reduced river water is expected to put very heavy pressure on the Indo-BD relationship. India could see a rather large influx due to one or both of them.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 17 Dec 2016 02:28

So, it is shale vs. Coal?

Coal baron to Trump: 'Temper' your coal job promises

He argued that natural gas has been the major driver of coal plant troubles and renewable energy sources like wind and solar continue to get cheaper.

Says coal usage has shrunk from 48% to 30% in about 8 years in the US.

Article good for data points. Need to read to catch up on latest thinking.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 17 Dec 2016 02:34

What if Trump dumps Paris climate deal?

How drastic might Trump's policy changes be? A report released Wednesday by the International Energy Agency (IEA) outlines two key scenarios for emissions and global warming in the coming decades.

The first scenario assumes world leaders keep the promises made in Paris last year at the United Nation's COP21 summit. The agreement between more than 175 countries introduced environmentally friendly policies to slow the increase in emissions and global warming.

The second scenario assumes no real action is taken and agreements are brushed aside, resulting in a 36% surge in carbon dioxide emissions by 2040, nearly three times the increase expected under the first scenario.

While that would be a nightmare for environmentalists, it's unlikely that all Paris signatories would abandon their pledges.

The data gets more interesting if you drill down to the country level. There, it's possible to gauge the impact of a scenario in which the U.S. bails on COP21, but the rest of the world sticks to its guns.

In that case, IEA data show that 10% of the emission reduction expected from the agreement by 2040 would be lost.

And if Trump manages to roll back regulations on the U.S. energy industry and dramatically boost shale oil and gas production, the damage could be even more severe.
Related: Energy stocks get 'yuge' Trump boost
If Trump follows through on his campaign promises, he may find himself isolated. Even America's biggest energy company -- Exxon Mobil (XOM) -- last week called the Paris agreement "an important step forward by world governments in addressing the serious risks of climate change."

According to a recent United Nations Environment report, the world is still heading for a temperature rise of 2.9 to 3.4 degrees Celsius this century, even with the Paris pledges.

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 17 Dec 2016 17:04

Scientists confirm that warm ocean water is melting the biggest glacier in East Antarctica

Scientists confirm that warm ocean water is melting the biggest glacier in East Antarctica

By Chris Mooney
December 16 at 2:00 PM

Scientists at institutions in the United States and Australia on Friday published a set of unprecedented ocean observations near the largest glacier of the largest ice sheet in the world: Totten glacier, East Antarctica. And the result was a troubling confirmation of what scientists already feared — Totten is melting from below.

The measurements, sampling ocean temperatures in seas over a kilometer (0.62 miles) deep in some places right at the edge of Totten glacier’s floating ice shelf, affirmed that warm ocean water is flowing in towards the glacier at the rate of 220,000 cubic meters per second.

These waters, the paper asserts, are causing the ice shelf to lose between 63 and 80 billion tons of its mass to the ocean per year, and to lose about 10 meters (32 feet) of thickness annually, a reduction that has been previously noted based on satellite measurements.

This matters because more of East Antarctica flows out towards the sea through the Totten glacier region than for any other glacier in the entirety of the East Antarctic ice sheet. Its entire “catchment,” or the region of ice that slowly flows outward through Totten glacier and its ice shelf, is larger than California. If all of this ice were to end up in the ocean somehow, seas would raise by about 11.5 feet.

“This ice shelf is thinning, and it’s thinning because the ocean is delivering warm water to the ice shelf, just like in West Antarctica,” said Don Blankenship, a glaciologist at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the study’s co-authors. Blankenship was not on the research vessel, but he and his colleagues helped the Australia-based researchers with understanding the contours of the seafloor so they could plan their field investigations into where warm and deep waters could penetrate.

The lead author of the research, published Friday in Science Advances, was Stephen Rintoul, a researcher with the University of Tasmania in Hobart and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO. Totten glacier is, more or less, due south of Australia and relatively close to one of Australia’s bases of operations on the ice continent, Casey Station.

Rintoul and his colleagues, on board the government vessel Aurora Australis, were able to navigate extremely close to the Totten ice shelf edge in January of 2015, when an opening in the sea ice allowed the ship to get in closer than one ever has before. This is how they were able to gather the required ocean observations — and to detect the warm water.

The researchers took ocean measurements at 10 separate points along the floating Totten ice shelf. And at two of the stations, they found that the ocean underneath was extremely deep. There was a six-mile-wide canyon at a depth of 600 meters (nearly 2000 feet) that then branched into two narrower canyons, each reaching greater depths. One of them was over 800 meters deep (more than 2,500 feet) the other was 1,097 meters deep (3,600 feet). Each was about one to two miles wide.

It was in these deep undersea canyons, and a few shallower areas as well, that warm ocean water, called modified circumpolar deep water, was flowing inward powerfully towards Totten glacier. And the previously measured loss of ice from the ice shelf matched closely with the amount of heat that the ocean was delivering, the paper found.

Granted, calling the waters reaching Totten at great depths “warm” is a bit of a misnomer —they are slightly below the freezing point. However, at the extreme pressures and depths involved, the freezing point of ice itself lowers, making these waters more than warm enough to melt ice.

Measuring the warm water reaching Totten was, until now, a missing puzzle piece in determining what’s happening with the glacier. Prior research, for instance, had shown the presence of cavities that warm water could enter, and scientists believed this was occurring because they had observed Totten thinning and lowering in the water. But as NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot put it to the Post at the time, “it is one thing to find potential pathways for warm water to intrude the cavity, it is another to show that this is actually happening.”

Now, scientists are showing that it’s actually happening.

The researchers are interested in Totten not only because of the massive global consequences were it to be destabilized, but also because it could help solve a riddle from the Earth’s past. Researchers have calculated that during previous warm eras, such as during the Pliocene, about 3 million years ago, global temperatures not too much higher than those that exist today led to radical amounts of sea level rise. It’s too much of an ocean surge for the loss of West Antarctica, alone, to explain — so they’ve been going looking to East Antarctica to close the sea-level budget from those eras.

And it turns out that like West Antarctica, East Antarctica features several regions — including Totten — where massive amounts of ice rise above the ocean level, but are grounded deep below it. In the case of Totten glacier, its so-called “grounding line,” which is where the glacier begins to lift off the seafloor and to float, forming an ice shelf with an ocean cavity beneath it, is nearly a mile and a half deep.

Granted, none of this means that Totten is contributing much to sea-level rise — yet. The large loss of ice from the ice shelf doesn’t raise seas because that ice is already afloat. But the weakening of the ice shelf is troubling because the shelf holds back Totten’s more dangerous ice, and when it goes it will allow that ice to flow more easily into the ocean.

For Blankenship, the new study, combined with past aircraft and satellite research on Totten, puts the remaining piece in place and suggests an increasingly clear picture of ocean-driven melt that could lead to growing instability.

“The whole process is here and going on,” he says. “This is the biggest potential contributor in East Antarctica. It needs to be understood.”

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 18 Dec 2016 05:38

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/photos ... by-11-feet

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 18 Dec 2016 07:18

SaiK wrote:
This Melting Glacier in Antarctica Could Raise Sea Levels By 11 Feet

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 18 Dec 2016 09:14

Global temp rise over the decades:

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/interactive ... rature.mp4

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/ ... vanishing/

BD:

Rammpal · Post by **Rammpal** » 19 Dec 2016 06:29

"...Sea level rise has been estimated to be on average between +2.6 millimetres (0.10 in) and 2.9 millimetres (0.11 in) per year ± 0.4 millimetres (0.016 in) since 1993[3] and has accelerated in recent years.[4] For the period between 1870 and 2004, global average sea levels are estimated to have risen a total of 195 millimetres (7.7 in), and 1.7 millimetres (0.067 in) ± 0.3 millimetres (0.012 in) per year, with a significant acceleration of sea-level rise of 0.013 millimetres (0.00051 in) ± 0.006 millimetres (0.00024 in) per year...."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise

Plenty of 'estimated to rise' in there, i.e.: even they are not sure about this.
Anyway, how many hundred years are we looking at before all those 1-m zones go sub-sea ?

NRao · Post by **NRao** » 19 Dec 2016 07:06

Sea level rise (SLR) is NOT uniform across the globe (discussed a few pages ago). SLR is a highly localized phenomenon.

BD happens to be the nation, for whatever reason (I have not come across why it is so), that has already been impacted. NOT will be, already there.

There are plenty of article on BD and SLR, but here is one from a few months ago.

Haunting Photos Show Effects Of Climate Change In Bangladesh

BTW, SLR does not mean the ONLY danger is water encroaching. It could mean, and in many case is, such as BD, does mean soil erosion and water pollution. Land mass can slide into the sea, without the sea encroaching onto the land. Typically cliffs and if humans have built in such areas, then the loss is yugely. And, along with all this is pollution of the water and many a times under ground potable water tables. Salt water encroachment into sweet waters is another problem - loss of fishing and in some cases (Australia?) invasive fish taking over the local habitat. SLR also means higher temps, making for unpredictable (from a local's PoV) weather disturbances.

Alaksa is witnessing entire villages under threat from SLR.

Check out the CNN report on species vanishing - extinction.

Wiki for you too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_sea_level

Global mean air temperature is increasing in relation to global warming.[5][6] As a result, Earth’s ice volume is decreasing[7][8] and the heat content of the ocean is increasing.[9] Global mean sea level is therefore rising, and the rate of rise has accelerated.[10][11][12] Sea-level rise (SLR) presents challenges to coastal communities and ecosystems, and planners are engaged in assessing management options.[13] Accordingly, it is desirable to have an estimate of SLR this century to properly design mitigation and adaptation strategies. An approximation of SLR by the end of the century will allow: 1) estimates of coastal erosion and changes in vulnerability to coastal hazards; 2) assessments of threats to coastal ecosystems; and 3) development of climate risk management policies. This paper reviews recent studies of global warming, sea-level observations, global ice volume, ocean heating, and estimates of SLR by the end of the 21st century.

Based on current scientific understanding, we conclude that a global mean rise of approximately 1 m around the end of the century is indicated by present research and constitutes an appropriate planning target at this time. However, sea-level rise will have important local variability that planners should consider as knowledge of that variability improves. Global mean sea-level may rise significantly more than 1 m, but is unlikely to raise significantly less.[14] Important questions remain regarding the melt rate of ice in West Antarctica and southern Greenland. Also unknown are the actual levels of natural climate variability and greenhouse gas accumulation that will be reached this century. However, even if atmospheric composition were stabilized today, global warming and SLR would continue.[15] Avoiding these changes requires, eventually, a reduction in emissions to substantially below present levels.[16]

Those are averages. BD is way ahead of that curve.