Something is happening here, Mr. Jones

Posted: January 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Climate Change | Tags: , , | 23 Comments

First you read about Nome, Alaska. It’s had such tough weather, a Russian tanker and a US Coast Guard icebreaker are painstakingly trying to deliver emergency fuel supplies. icebreaker in field of sea ice The icebreaker is facing backward because [T]he ice is under so much pressure, it closes up almost as soon as it’s broken. So the ship has to double back and re-break it. [Update: The view is from the icebreaker toward the tanker, which is facing forward. The icebreaker does double back, but that’s not what the picture shows. Sorry for the brain fart.]

You get the picture. Very severe winter in Alaska. They’ve declared a state of emergency and called out the National Guard. That’s in Alaska, where they are anything but pansies about winter.

satellite image of snow-covered Europe Now, a year or two back, Siberia and China had super-deep winters. Last year, Europe was in a deep freeze and showing up all white on satellite photos.

And then I remembered that the Europeans had connected their deep freeze with climate change. It works like this. As the Arctic sea ice melts, there’s more dark ocean to absorb the sun’s heat and less white ice to reflect it back. The overlying polar winter air is then much colder than the surface. Warm air rises, but the displaced cold polar air has to come down somewhere. And that place is south (and also north, I would guess) of the unnaturally warm zone. (It’s all horribly cold by our standards, but our standards don’t count.) So places like Siberia and Scotland get more snow and cold and the sea freezes thicker and harder. Maybe Alaska is just joining the club.

Isn’t messing with Nature fun? You never know what to expect.

Cross-posted from Acid Test

The only thing worse than running out of oil

Posted: December 22, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Climate Change, Psychopaths in charge | Tags: , , , , | 17 Comments

Is not running out of oil.

This headline today is not good news: Does shale oil boom mean U.S. energy independence is near?Smog in New York. (Edwin Ewing, Wikimedia) Neither is this one that the US has a “200-year-supply” of coal. Nor these about all the fuel available in the Marcellus Shale, or the Canadian tar sands, or the Green River oil shale.

At this point it’s obvious to the meanest intelligence that burning fossil fuels adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which causes climate change, which causes floods, fire, famine, pestilence, and war. It will kill billions of humans. I’ll repeat that. It will kill us. And I do mean “us.” Anybody who thinks they’ll be unaffected by the social consequences of global disasters is too dumb to last long in the hard new world. We are committing suicide.

We’re doing it right now. Not tomorrow. Not if things get worse. All we have to do is keep on doing what we’re doing.

Can I tell you a secret? Apparently, a lot of people don’t know this. Earth is the only planet we have.

Greenhouse gases are a gun pointed at our own heads. We have pulled the trigger.

But now comes the only good news: Planets work very slowly. The bullet has decades to travel. It’s already been traveling for about two centuries. Who knows how much more time we have? Probably minutes, but at least we’re not dead yet. If we did it very fast, we could move our heads out of the way.

Instead people write pleased headlines that more ways have been found to keep the bullet on track.

The whole species is headed for a Darwin Award. Except in this case it’ll be the planet whose survival is improved after we eliminate ourselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner.

Crossposted from Acid Test

Late Night Climate Change Open Thread

Posted: December 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Climate Change, Environment | Tags: , , , , , | 4 Comments


From Mother Nature Network Blog:

Patagonia’s Jorge Montt glacier is melting faster than any other glacier in Chile, having shrunk by more than half a mile in just 12 months, researchers announced Wednesday. And they have 1,445 photos to prove it.

The glacier is located 1,000 miles south of Santiago in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, which covers 4.1 million acres in the Andes between Chile and Argentina. According to the Center for Scientific Studies in Valdivia, which has made a time-lapse video of the retreating glacier, Jorge Montt’s snout shrunk by 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) from January 2010 to February 2011.

“Patagonia has experienced climate change at rates much more moderate than those observed in the rest of the world,” glaciologist Andres Rivera says in a press release about the findings. “However, almost all the glaciers of the region have lost area. And Jorge Montt is the one that has the record retreat.”

….

That retreat has already altered the surrounding landscape, including the emergence of the 12-mile-long, 1,300-foot-deep fjord, which wasn’t previously listed on local maps. It also highlights the plight of glaciers across Patagonia — according to a study published in April, Patagonia’s glacial melting has “increased markedly” in recent decades, contributing about 10 percent of global sea-level rise related to mountain glaciers in the past 50 years. And as glaciologist Michel Barer tells the Associated Press, the problem of retreating glaciers “is really hot in South America” overall.

Pun intended? Watch the video:

Political Cage Match: Professor versus Puffed-Up Congressman

Posted: November 25, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Congress, corruption, education, Environment, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska)

Last Friday historian Douglas Brinkley testified before the House Natural Resources Committee on the topic of preserving the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Republicans, of course, have been trying for years to open it up to oil drilling. Brinkley, whose latest book is The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960, argued that preserving one of the last truly wild places in the U.S. should trump helping the oil companies make more money.

Alaska Rep. Don Young (who had skipped most of the testimony) broke into Brinkley’s presentation, calling the historian by the wrong name and saying his testimony was “garbage.” Then the two had a hilarious shouting match. IMO, Brinkley came out the winner, but judge for yourself:

Young: If you ever want want to see an exercise in futility … That side has already made up its mind and this side has already made up its mind. I call it garbage, Dr. Rice, it comes from the mouth –

Brinkley: It’s Dr. Brinkley. Rice is a university – I know you went to Yuba [a community college] and you couldn’t graduate.

Young: Well, okay, I can call you anything I want if you sit in that chair. You just be quiet! You be quiet!

Brinkley: You don’t own me. I pay your salary.

Young: I don’t own you, but I can tell you right now—

Brinkley: I work for the private sector, you work for the taxpayer.

Next, committee chairman Doc Hastings interrupted and lectured Brinkley. But Young was still “pissed right now.”

Finally, Brinkley said he was surprised to

hear a congressman today say there’s nothing in his district. It’s boring. It’s flat. It’s not exciting. I don’t know a representative who doesn’t love their district. Every state in America’s landscape is beautiful if you love it. But some people love money more than their homeland or where they live, and I’m afraid that that’s why this fight has to keep coming up 50 years later, we’re still trying to tell people the Arctic refuge is real. It belongs to the American people.

On Friday evening, Brinkley appeared on The Ed Show on MSNBC to discuss his experience with Rep. Young.

A week later, the Congressional cage match is still causing controversy. At the Minnesota Post, Don Shelby, a friend of Brinkley’s wrote a column about the dust up.

Brinkley told me he knew that Congressman Young, at another hearing, had waved a walrus penis bone at Mollie Beattie, the incoming chief of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Brinkley may have read the Rolling Stone article about Young that quotes the congressman as saying, “Environmentalists are a self-centered bunch of waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating, intellectual idiots.” The quote continues, “[They] are not Americans, never have been Americans and never will be Americans.” ….

Brinkley should not have been surprised that Congressman Young showed up late and missed the bulk of the historian’s testimony. Young is often cited as the congressman missing more votes than any other member of the House. Brinkley would have known that Young was the co-sponsor, with discredited Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, of the bill to pay for the infamous “bridge to nowhere.”

Brinkley told me: “Everyone knows that Young is just a menacing blowhard. He has a history of being rude, he browbeats and he’s snotty toward anyone who cares about the environment.”

I asked Brinkley if he was surprised that Committee Chair Doc Hastings took Young’s side and continued lecturing the historian. “No,” said Brinkley. “They are tied together at the hip. They are both oil company factotums. They are a tag team.”

Young claims that Brinkley is just milking the incident to sell books. Brinkley told a Houston TV station

that his students applauded when he walked into class. “I have received now hundreds and hundreds of emails from people all over, I’ve not received one negative one,” he said. “I’ve had my entire Rice University and including Texas conservatives cheering me on for standing up to his bullying tactics.”

I’m not usually much of a fan of Brinkley’s, but I have to applaud him on this one. I don’t care if he’s doing it to sell books. Greedy, incompetent politicians like Don Young need to be revealed for what they are: pigs at the trough.

Controversial Keystone Pipeline put on Hold

Posted: November 10, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Environment | Tags: | 5 Comments

I was rather surprised to see that the state of Nebraska played a big role in getting President Obama to delay a decision on the Keystone Pipeline.  Nebraska is a sparsely populated state with an overwhelmingly old, white, Republican profile.  This does seem to wreak of a ‘not in my back yard’ kind of protest but I have to agree that there’s a lot at stake if the oil leaks.  You can’t run anything through Nebraska that doesn’t endanger the Ogallala aquifer which is an important source of clean water. It is expansive and important to quite a few industries, communities, critters and people.    You can see that it spreads under the entire state and the western sections of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas if you look at the map up there on the left.  Yup, it’s a nifty map for a change!!

The impacted states are all highly reliable Republican but the zone is basically home to thousands of ranches and farms that rely on the aquifer. The decision has been delayed until after the election which seems a suspiciously convenient time even though Nebraska is a reliably Republican state.

The State Department said in a statement that it was ordering a review of alternate routes to avoid the environmentally sensitive Sand Hills region of Nebraska, which would have been put at risk by a rupture of the 1,700-mile pipeline carrying a heavy form of crude extracted from oil sands formations in Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast.

The move is the latest in a series of administration decisions pushing back thorny environmental matters beyond next November’s presidential election to try to avoid the heat from opposing interests —business lobbies or environmental and health advocates — and to find a political middle ground. Mr. Obama delayed a review of the nation’s smog standard until 2013, pushed back offshore oil lease sales in the Arctic until at least 2015 and blocked issuance of new regulations for coal ash from power plants.

The proposed project by a Canadian pipeline company, TransCanada, similarly put President Obama in a political vise, squeezed between the demand for a secure source of oil and the thousands of jobs the project will bring, and the loud agitation of environmental advocates who threatened to withhold electoral support next year if he approved it.

Mr. Obama said in an interview with an Omaha television station last week that he would make the ultimate decision about the pipeline, but sought to portray Thursday’s announcement as solely a State Department matter and not the result of political calculation.

“I support the State Department’s announcement today regarding the need to seek additional information about the Keystone XL pipeline proposal,” the president said after the announcement. “Because this permit decision could affect the health and safety of the American people as well as the environment, and because a number of concerns have been raised through a public process, we should take the time to ensure that all questions are properly addressed and all the potential impacts are properly understood.”

He said he remained committed to a politically balanced diet of increased domestic oil and gas production combined with incentives for the development of carbon-free alternatives.

While environmental groups welcomed their temporary victory on the pipeline project, some expressed skepticism about the president’s motives. Glenn Hurowitz, an environmental activist and senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, said the delay could leave the final decision in the hands of Mr. Obama’s Republican successor.

“This decision just puts off a green light for the tar sands by a year,” Mr. Hurowitz said in an e-mailed statement. “That’s why I’m a little dismayed at suggestions that this kick-the-can decision means environmentalists will enthusiastically back President Obama in 2012. Is the price of an environmentalist’s vote a year’s delay on environmental catastrophe? Excuse me, no.”

This definitely pits the farming/ranching pioneering west against the oil industry and those industries and communities reliant on oil.  It should be an interesting fight to watch since the pipeline threatens a lot of pristine habitat–including the amazing Sand Hills–as well as the aquifer. Having endured the Gulf Oil Spill, my suggestion to my old home state is to fight this with everything you’ve got.  They’ll put your lifestyle and your livelihoods in danger because there are a lot more of them with power than you.

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