One Last Post

I think I'm shutting down this Blog.

There is little else to report - the science just gets more and more solid, the Politicians lack the spine to do anything about it, the Deniers make less and less sense, and probable conditions just get worse.

My last map - the Earth as of 2060, unless Mankind gets its act together:

It's just getting too depressing.

My apologies to my children and grandchildren for any part I may have had in this outcome.

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This is Not Cool

90 Degree River Shuts Tennessee Nuclear Plant for Second Time

From Climate Progress:

As oblivious as the proverbial frogs in slowly boiling water, we are beginning to experience the seemingly benign first years of catastrophic climate change. With the temperature in the Tennessee River approaching that of a nice warm hot tub, for a second summer in a row, three Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear power plants had to shut down this week.

As temperatures across the South have skyrocketed in record-breaking heatwaves, the water in the Tennessee River, where the plants discharge their cooling water, is already a staggering 90 degrees.
Because hot rivers are not good for fish, by law nuclear plants must not heat rivers above 86.9 degrees with their discharged water.
But that now quaint-seeming environmental protection was passed decades ago, well before global warming began to impact air and water temperatures. Summers like these make environmental niceties like not overheating rivers with nuclear cooling water a bit irrelevant, because the river in question is already as hot as a hot tub.

“When the river’s ambient temperature reaches 90 degrees, we can’t add any heat to it,” TVA’s nuclear spokesman Ray Golden told the Times Free Press.

The shutdown marks the second summer in a row that TVA has had to shut down nuclear power as local rivers have reached record temperatures.Last year’s shutdown cost the company $50 million in replacement power, a cost it passed along to its customers. To forestall the same problem reoccurring in future years, TVA invested $80 million in a seventh cooling tower at Browns Ferry, which began construction last October.

Why Didn't Anyone See This Coming?

Texas is facing its worst drought ever....

 

Those Stupid, Lying Climate Scientists - Why didn't they warn us about stuff like this?

Ohh, wait...

Antarctica's Ice Less Stable Than Greenland's

New Study Predicts 'Scary' Collapse Anytime

July 29, 2011 3:17 AM EDT

Melting ice sheets of Greenland have been a cause of concern for researchers and climate change proponents, as previous studies on the ice sheet behavior projected Greenland's ice less stable compared to Antarctica's ice. But a recent study by scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggests that we may have got it all wrong.

New results published by geoscience assistant professor Anders Carlson and his team in the July 29 edition of "Science," are revealing surprising patterns of melting during the last interglacial period that suggest that Greenland's ice may be more stable and Antarctica's less stable, contrary to what many thought.

Energy Efficiency Part 1

A Danger we "Warmists" Missed

I don't remember ever hearing about this from any Climate Scientist...

PARIS, July 24, 2011 (AFP) - "Dirty Dozen" chemicals, including the notoriously toxic DDT, are being freed from Arctic sea ice and snow through global warming, a study published on Sunday suggested.

The "Dirty Dozen" — formally known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) — were widely used as insecticides and pesticides before being outlawed in 2001. They are extremely tough molecules that take decades to break down in nature. They also bio-accumulate, meaning that as they pass up the food chain, concentrations rise, posing a fertility threat to higher species. In addition, they are insoluble in water and easily revolatilise, so can swiftly transit from soil and water to the atmosphere in response to higher temperatures.

The study, published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, looked at atmospheric concentrations of three chemicals — DDT, HCH and cis-chlordane — monitored between 1993 and 2009 at a station in Norway's Svalbard Islands and at another in the Canadian Arctic. The scientists indeed found a long-term downward trend in primary emissions after the Stockholm Convention banned production and trade in the "Dirty Dozen."

But a more complex and disturbing picture emerged when the same data was crunched through a simulation of the effect of global warming on POP concentrations.

Fraud