Climate Change

You had "experimental sex" with your gay brother growing up, but you're not gay? LOL
You said your degree was in waste management, as in garbage collection.
You also claimed you put me on ignore, for the 4th time.

 

this is what bothers me about you. What does "conservative" or "liberal" or republican or democrat have to do with climate change or food supply? Right now those of us that are conservative are trying to figure out how to deal with the record corn crop this year. How will that affect the cattle that got burned because of the drought? Now we have a lot of feed, but not a lot of feeders. How are you Liberals dealing with it?

 

We're discovering how liberals are going to pass the buck when inflation of necessities demands an answer.

It had nothing to do with their deficits, their zirp, their qe, or their strangling regulation. It was because of climate change that republicans wouldn't buy into.

 

Conservatives etc think global warming is nonsense. Democrats etc don't.

As for what to do about the drought, suggestions are welcome.

 

Water is the new oil: How corporations took over a basic human right

LINDSAY ABRAMS

When you talk about human rights, not to mention human necessities, there’s not much more fundamental than water. The United Nations has even put it in writing: it formally “recognizes the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights.”

That’s the theory, at least. In practice? Well, on Monday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes arrived at a different conclusion from that of the U.N., in a ruling on Detroit’s hotly contested practice of cutting off water access to tens of thousands of residents who can’t pay their bills. “It cannot be doubted that water is a necessary ingredient to sustaining life,” Rhodes conceded. Yet there is not, he continued, “an enforceable right to free and affordable water.” Water, in the eyes of the court, is apparently a luxury.

While it’s shocking to watch a city deny the rights of its own citizens, that’s nothing compared to what could happen if private water companies are allowed to take over. In “The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos,” Karen Piper details the litany of examples worldwide of this very thing happening. In a classic example of the shock doctrine, Piper argues, water shortages are being seen as a business opportunity for multinational corporations. Their mantra: “No money, no water.” By 2025, it’s predicted they’ll be serving 21 percent of the world’s population.

Piper, who teaches at the University of Missouri, traveled to six of the world’s continents to expose the way corporate control has redefined water as an economic good, with consequences ranging from increasing inequality to civil unrest. Her conversation with Salon, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity, is below:

There have been a few drinking water crises in the U.S. this year that I think made people stop and think about where their water is coming from, but I’d say most probably don’t give much thought to the politics behind drinking water. What are some of the main misconceptions you’re working with about how water access works?

It depends on what country you’re talking about. I think here in the U.S., we have the misconception of taking water for granted completely and forgetting the long history of the battle people went through to get public water in this country. It used to be that there were private companies running the water supplies in the United States. At the beginning of the century, they started having major cholera outbreaks, which led to it being turned over to public utilities. Now, because we haven’t taken care of that system in terms of providing the funding for it, I think there’s a danger of losing it. As we decrease our funding for public water, private companies are being courted to come in and take over cities that are in dire circumstances with their water infrastructure. So Detroit, for instance, is an example.

I guess that’s an example of what can go wrong.

Yeah. In Detroit, you know, they ran out of money to support public infrastructure, so they’ve been basically raising rates for consumers as a way to entice private water companies to take over. But they’ve also been cutting off tens of thousands of people from their water when they can’t pay. And that’s the kind of thing that you look at. Corporations are a lot more ruthless about water cutoffs. So they raise rates and they cut off water.

So what does this look like globally?

Pretty dire. I think there are three main issues facing the planet in terms of our water supplies and a global water crisis. One is climate change, one is pollution and one is groundwater over-extraction. Basically, we have the same amount of water on Earth as we’ve had in the time of the dinosaurs, and a lot of people don’t realize that. The problem is that what has changed is where water is located. So climate change moves water, pumping groundwater moves water. But people are not so movable. You just can’t pick up Los Angeles and move it to wherever the water has gone when this year’s snowpack disappears.

“Water shortage” is a sort of misnomer. What we’re losing are our water storage systems. So we’re losing our glaciers, which are called our freshwater banks, and we’re losing our fossil water, which takes thousands and millions of years to be replenished. One of those places is in the United States: the Ogallala Aquifer is disappearing. Also, in Northern India there’s an aquifer that’s been depleted so much they’re experiencing epidemic fluoride poisoning right now, because when you get to the bottom of those aquifers you find pollutants that have settled there over time. They’re naturally occurring minerals that have settled there.

Then there’s also the problem of pollution. Twenty percent of the world right now does not have access to clean water. Twenty percent of the world also happens to live on less than a dollar a day. And it’s interesting to look at how much those two groups overlap. When people don’t have water, what you get is social instability, basically, and that 20 percent may have been living next to the same river since the beginning of time, but suddenly that river is polluted and they get sick and die when they drink it. So what happens is that corporations see water pollution as sort of a boon for them because as water gets more polluted, it gets more expensive to drink and then you get even more of a divide between the rich and the poor over who gets clean water and who doesn’t.

And one last thing with climate change. I think people don’t really understand a lot about how it works. They say, “Oh, the glaciers are melting so we’ll have more water.” But the problem is that water is just rushing into the ocean. So you have to think of climate change as this giant saltwater-making factory, almost. It’s just like sending water to the ocean. And we couldn’t build enough giant dams to stop all that water, and if we did it would cause all sorts of other problems. It’s the same thing with the way we do agriculture. It’s like we’re pumping out these fossil aquifers mainly for agriculture and that’s where the world’s breadbaskets are. But when we do that, that aquifer also becomes polluted and salinated and runs to the ocean. So there’s an enormous amount of water that we’re just throwing away in this sense.

You’ve traced some major conflicts to water shortages, or at least seen that as one of the contributing factors …

And right now what I have my eye on is ISIS. When I wrote my book, I sort of saw that something like that would happen there, because there has for decades been a conflict between Turkey and Iraq and Syria over how much water Iraq and Syria get. Their water comes from Turkey, which is a water-rich country, and Turkey has been cutting it off with these massive dam systems that have been supported by the World Bank until recently. ISIS, now, is very aware of this issue, and one of their main goals has been to take over the water supplies in Iraq and in Syria.

So right now, all three of those countries are using water as weapons against each other. Turkey has cut off water to Syria, for instance, as a way to get Syria not to support the Kurds there. And also, Turkey has just been very belligerent about saying those water resources are theirs and not coming to the negotiating table over it. I saw people really fighting over this at the World Water Forum because it was a disaster waiting to happen. When it’s reported in the media, it always bothers me, because the media reports it as just evil fundamentalists. And it’s true there’s that component to it, but you have to think about what’s drawing these evil fundamentalists to these groups. When people are uneducated and in dire circumstances and feel like that’s all they can do, it tends to draw a lot of young kids to that. more . . .

 

Glaciers Lose 204 Billion Tons of Ice in Three Years

Antarctica is losing so much mass that it’s actually changing Earth’s gravity.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...e-204-billion-tons-of-ice-in-three-years.html

 

The rich like to believe that they have enough money to insulate themselves from all this, such as the water/food issue. But there are some things that no amount of money will fix (unless they have plans to move to another planet).

 

If a Tree Falls in the Forest, But No Scientist Says So...

Michael E. Mann

Recently, the highly respected Bulletin of the American Meteorology Society("BAMS" to those in the know), published aspecial issue consisting of a couple dozen articles investigating the potential impact climate change might have had on various extreme weather events of 2013. This has become somewhat of an annual rite now (see for example the corresponding2012 special issue), a sort of scientific postmortem on what role climate change might have played in specific weather events.

It might be tempting to view this volume as an authoritative statement by the scientific community on the role climate change may or may not have had in some high profile, devastating recent extreme weather events. But that would be misguided. The BAMS special issue is not a representative, community-wide scientific assessment like those published by theNational Academy of Sciencesor theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The editors, instead, have solicited contributions from a relatively small number of groups, so the findings do not necessarily reflect the range of views of the broader scientific community. Some leading climate scientists who were not included in the effort have presented evidence of a greater role for climate change in several of the events dismissed or downplayed by the BAMS articles (see e.g. Kevin Trenberth of NCAR on theSeptember 2013 Colorado floods, Stefan Rahmstorf of the University of Potsdam on theJune 2013 Central European floodsand Jennifer Francis of Rutgers on the2013/2014 California Drought).

The California drought is of particular interest since it is both an unprecedented and absolutely devastatingongoing event. The thread potentially connecting that event to climate change is the unusual atmospheric pattern that prevailed during winter 2013/2014. That pattern was associated with a persistent "ridge" of high pressure over the western U.S. (see my previousHuffington Postpiece) that caused the jet stream to plunge southward over the central U.S., chilling the eastern third of the country, and to veer northward over the west coast, pushing the warm moist subtropical Pacific air masses that would normally deliver plentiful rainfall (and snowpack) to California well to the north, resulting in bone-dry conditions in California and balmy weather in Alaska.

In fact, there are at least three different mechanisms that are potentially relevant to the connection between the 2013/2014 California drought and human-caused climate change. There is (1) the impact of climate change on the pattern of sea surface temperature (SST) off the west coast. Onerecent studysuggests that climate change favors an SST pattern in the North Pacific that increases the incidence of the atmospheric circulation pattern responsible for the current drought. Then there is (2) the marked decrease in Arctic Sea Ice due to global warming. Studies going backmore than a decadeshow that reduced Arctic sea ice may also favor such an atmospheric circulation pattern. Morerecent workby Jennifer Francis of Rutgers provides independent support for that mechanism. Finally, there is (3) the effect of global warming on soil moisture. All other things being equal, warming of soils leads to greater rates of evaporation and drying. This mechanism leads to worsened drought even if rainfall patterns are unchanged.

One of the three BAMS articlesinvestigating the climate change connection with the California Drought (by Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford and collaborators) did find a climate change role. They found that the high pressure ridge responsible for deflecting storms to the northwasindeed made more likely by climate change. Even without accounting for increased evaporation due to warmer soils, they conclude that climate change likely increased the probability of the 2013/2014 California drought.

Two of the three BAMS articles, however, argue against a climate change connection. But here's the problem: the experimental design used in these studies completely leaves out all three of the mechanisms described above. These studies only looked at the impact of the overall warming of SSTs, without addressing whether climate change might be favoring the specific pattern of SST tied to the high pressure ridge and consequent drought. Neither of the studies accounts for the possible impact of decreasing Arctic Sea Ice (Indeed, one of the two studies explicitly acknowledges this shortcoming: "Other factors, such as the impact of climate change on the...SST gradient and storm tracks... and changes in sea ice extent... are not examined."). Finally, neither of the studies account for the impact of warming on soil evaporation. So, the fact that two of the three studies find no climate change connection may simply point to deficiencies in the approaches used. The adage "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" would appear to apply in spades here.

Predictably, the conflicting findings and mixed message of the BAMS report led toconfused and misleading headlineslike the LA Times "California drought and climate warming: Studies find no clear link". Contrast that with Stanford'spress release"Causes of California drought linked to climate change, Stanford scientists say" and the Sacramento Beecommentary"Droughts likely to be new normal for California".

I fear that the problem here runs far deeper than the specific flaws in the experimental designs of certain studies. What is most problematic is an over-dependence on climate model "detection and attribution" approaches for assessing the impact of climate change on the likelihood of extreme weather events. That machinery fails when the approaches used in these studies fail to capture real-world processes that may be critical to these relationships. The failure to identify a climate change impact may simply represent a failure on the part of the chosen model to capture real world processes, rather than the absence of a climate change influence on the events in question.

(cont'd)

 

I'm troubled that this latter possibility receives such short thrift in many of the articles in the BAMS volume. Indeed, a quote by UK scientist Myles Allen in theNew York Times' coverage of the BAMS findings encapsulates the hubris by some climate researchers: "If we don't have evidence, I don't think we should hint darkly all the time that human influence must be to blame somehow." Never mind the caricature of his fellow scientists here as furtively attempting, in the absence of any evidence, to blame every weather event on climate change (who are these scientists that Allen speaks of? I've never read any quotes by climate scientists that could possibly be characterized this way). The real problem is the lack of humility among some scientists when it comes to evaluating the potential impacts that climate change may be having on our environment. As leading climate scientist Kevin Trenberthhas put it, "The environment in which all storms form has changed owing to human activities." Trenberth notes that global warming has already increased the average amount of water vapor in the atmosphere by about 4%, "extra moisture flowing into the storms that produced the heavy rains and likely contributed to the strength of the storms through added energy."

In other words, climate change has fundamentally altered the atmospheric environment in which all weather takes place, and has very likely increased the frequency and intensity of various types of extreme weather, including more intense flooding events, more extensive continental drought, more extreme heat and more intense storms. Just because an event hasn't been positively "attributed" to climate change in a formal "detection and attribution" study does not preclude speaking about the role climate change may have played, when the event is (a) consistent with expectations in a warming world, and (b) part of a larger trend. A negative finding in an attribution study could be a consequence of deficiencies in the experimental design. And the notion that scientists could possibly publish a peer-reviewed article for every weather event that may have been influenced by climate change is, on its face, absurd.

And so to return to where we started, just as a tree that falls in the forest did so whether or not a scientist was there to observe it, an extreme weather event influenced by climate change was thusly influenced, whether or not a scientist published a peer-reviewed article establishing so. We should keep that in mind when we talk about the ways that climate change is already impacting extreme weather, and likely to impact it further if we do nothing to reduce the ongoing warming of the planet.

 

Humanity spends more on lipstick than it does on making sure our species survives the century.

Jaan Tallinn