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.

.

.

.

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

Arctic Sea Ice to Disappear by 2030

More evidence of just how serious the situation is:


"Sea ice in the Arctic is melting at a record pace this year, suggesting warming at the north pole is speeding up and a largely ice-free Arctic can be expected in summer months within 30 years.

The area of the Arctic ocean at least 15% covered in ice is this week about 8.5m sq kilometres – lower than the previous record low set in 2007 – according to satellite monitoring by the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado. In addition, new data from the University of Washington Polar Science Centre, shows that the thickness of Arctic ice this year is also the lowest on record.

In the past 10 days, the Arctic ocean has been losing as much as 150,000 square kilometres of sea a day, said Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC.

'The extent [of the ice cover] is going down, but it is also thinning. So a weather pattern that formerly would melt some ice, now gets rid of much more. There will be ups and downs, but we are on track to see an ice-free summer by 2030. It is an overall downward spiral.'"
The Entire Article

More Awards for the Chevy Volt

Best Caption from a contest by Filmark:
Dear Chevy Volt Owners, Please be courteous and buy a gallon of gas a couple times a year if you desire to continue to use our facilities to clean your windshields. Thank you, The Management.”

Since its introduction, the Chevy Volt has won just about every Automotive award available to it.

Here's one more:

MOTORWEEK NAMES CHEVROLET VOLT 2011 DRIVERS’ CHOICE “BEST OF THE YEAR”

CHICAGO, IL -- Delivering a practical electric car for the masses, the Chevrolet Volt eclipsed the competition to capture MotorWeek’s coveted “Best of the Year” 2011 Drivers’ Choice Award. The honor was announced at the 2011 Chicago Auto Show by MotorWeek, television’s longest running and most respected automotive series.

It's All a Hoax...

A Victory for Climate Science

Exxonmobil Finally Cuts Financing to Deniers

From The Guardian:

according to Greenpeace’s research director, Kert Davies, ExxonMobil has sharply reduced its funding for groups that dispute that global warming is under way.


Greenpeace used a Freedom of Information Act Request to obtain extensive records and e-mails from the Smithsonian regarding Dr. Soon’s research funding. It discovered, for example, a $55,000 grant from ExxonMobil in 2007-8 for research on “Arctic climate change.”

For more than a decade now, climate scientists and their allies have linked Exxon money to groups that promote skepticism of the science underlying global warming. The links brought Exxon some negative press. Then in 2008, the company promised shareholders it would stop financing groups that had become a “distraction.”

Many climate groups wondered if it would follow through. But recent evidence indicates that it has to a significant extent. Alan Jeffers, an ExxonMobil spokesperson, says the company and its foundation are no longer disbursing grants to Dr. Soon, for example.

Greenpeace said that Exxon’s most recent annual worldwide giving report, released this week, confirmed that it was not financing Dr. Soon. Numerous other groups that are critics of climate science and longtime Exxon beneficiaries — the Frontiers of Freedom and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, for example — have also been dropped, according to that report.

In total, Greenpeace found Exxon has reduced its donations to such groups from a peak of $3.4 million in 2005 to less than $800,000 for 2010.

Now if we can just do something about the Koch brothers...

Actually, this fits with my own observations - there is just less going on in the Denier camp this year - the extreme weather around the world has driven many to silence. Denialism is not going to disappear soon, but it looks like Mother Nature has driven them for cover for a while.


The most Ironic bit is that Sen. James Inhofe, the biggest Denier in the US Senate, has had to cancel his participating in the Heartland Climate Denial Conference because he's "Under the Weather"... It turns out he went swimming in algae infested water - algae brought on by Warming...

.

The Answer for Cow Farts?

One item contributing to Global Warming that always gets a laugh from Deniers is Cow farts - the methane being produced by cattle. Deniers seem to think this proves that Mother Nature is in charge, and there's nothing we can do about it, completely overlooking the fact that those are OUR cows..

Some extreme "Warmists" are almost as, bad, also assuming there's nothing we can do about cows. Their only solution is to ban cattle - something confirmed carnivores such as myself will never accept.

So what CAN we do?

"Earth facing mini-ice age!!" say the media. Now for the science....

How Climate Science Grew

The following is an interactive tool develped by the Bloggers at Skeptical Science that shows how many papers have been issued on the subject, year by year. The bigger the bubble, the more papers there were:

Climate Science History

Fascinating...

Postponement

Are You Ready for More?

From Newsweek:

Joplin, Missouri after the tornado that hit on May 22

Joplin, Mo., was prepared. The tornado warning system gave residents 24 minutes’ notice that a twister was bearing down on them. Doctors and nurses at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, who had practiced tornado drills for years, moved fast, getting patients away from windows, closing blinds, and activating emergency generators. And yet more than 130 people died in Joplin, including four people at St. John’s, where the tornado sucked up the roof and left the building in ruins, like much of the shattered city.

Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century. Worldwide, the litany of weather’s extremes has reached biblical proportions. The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 15,000 people. Floods in Australia and Pakistan killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. A months-long drought in China has devastated millions of acres of farmland. And the temperature keeps rising: 2010 was the hottest year on earth since weather records began.

From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven’t seen anything yet. And we are not prepared.

The "Temp Leads Carbon" Crock: Updated

I'm A Climate Scientist

Renewable Energy CAN Work!

Copied from Climate Progress, by Stephen Lacey:

Throughout my years covering clean energy, I’ve found that people involved in the field generally fall into two camps. The first camp – typically made up of investors, engineers and developers in the business of renewable energy – argues that clean energy can scale to high penetrations with current technologies. The second camp – made up of a diverse group of doubters, spin artists, cautious supporters and high-minded futurists – believes that we can only bring renewables to scale with dramatic breakthroughs in technology.


Of course, the latter group’s view is not completely wrong: We certainly need continued technological progress in order to bring down the cost of manufacturing, increase efficiencies and make installation easier. However, their arguments often lead to the perception that renewables are not ready today – which is completely false (see Pro-geoengineering Bill Gates disses efficiency, “cute” solar, deployment).

Saying that clean energy can’t scale without significant breakthroughs is like saying we shouldn’t bother with the internet because all we have is desktop computers and DSL, rather than powerful mobile devices and a 4G network. The fact is we are in the middle of an important period of technological progress today, and saying that we need to wait for something “game-changing” to take action is wrong and downright dangerous.