Airplane Contrails May Be Creating Accidental Geoengineering Dissipating haze from plane exhaust alters how sunlight reaches the Earth and may be unintentionally affecting our climate If you go outside on a clear day and look up toward the sun—being careful to block out the bright disk with your thumb—you might see a hazy white region surrounding our star. This haze is caused by airplanes, and it is gradually whitening blue skies, says Charles Long of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. “We might be actually conducting some unintentional geoengineering here,” Long said at a press conference this week at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco. Geoengineering involves the manipulation of an environmental process in such a way, usually deliberate, that it affects the Earth’s climate. For instance, previous researchers have proposed combating global warming by intentionally seeding the atmosphere with small particles, or aerosols, to scatter some sunlight and reduce the amount of heat trapped by greenhouse gases. Long and his colleagues don’t yet have enough data to know how much of an effect the icy haze left by airplanes may be having on the climate or whether it is contributing to warming or cooling. But its existence demonstrates yet another way that humans might be altering the climate system, Long says, and “you can see this with your own eyes.” The discovery comes out of studies of how much sunlight reaches the Earth’s surface. This energy is not constant. From the 1950s to the 1980s, for instance, the sun seemed to slightly dim, then it started to brighten. When scientists looked for a cause, they tried linking these changes to the sun’s variable output, said Martin Wild of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich during the press conference. But they couldn’t find any correlations. “If it’s not the sun, it must be the atmosphere” responsible for the change, he said. High levels of pollution in the mid-20th century sent massive amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere, where they blocked some of the sun’s energy. But when places like the United States and Europe began polluting less, the amount of aerosols decreased, and the sun appeared to slightly brighten. Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...geoengineering-180957561/#WavlJGPdHh8JFrz4.99 Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
I know this may sound like a stupid question. But do they have catalytic converters on airplanes? Planes use jet fuel, which is only a higher grade of diesel fuel. They have catalytic converters on cars and recently required them on tractor trailers. Can they put them on planes too? So what if it reduces the mileage or increases the cost. Just raise ticket prices.
Koch Brothers gave $21 million to Groups Defending ExxonMobil’s Climate Cover Up The Kochs have spent over $88 million in *traceable* funding to groups attacking climate change science, policy and regulation. Of that total, $21 million went to groups that recently bought a full page New York Times advertisement defending ExxonMobil from government investigations into its systematic misrepresentation of climate science. If you’re an executive at a big oil company watching as ExxonMobil is finally exposed for studying climate change, covering up the science and spreading misinformation, you’re probably worried now that state attorneys general are knocking on Exxon’s door... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/connor-gibson/koch-brothers-gave-21-mil_b_10602398.html
Federal Lab Forced To Close After ‘Disturbing’ Data Manipulation "The inorganic section of the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Energy Geochemistry Laboratory in Lakewood, Colo. manipulated data on a variety of topics – including many related to the environment – from 1996 to 2014. The manipulation was caught in 2008, but continued another six years." Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/23/f...r-disturbing-data-manipulation/#ixzz4CWaDNr00
"Tell me results you want and I will get them for you." Sounds like every government funded lab involved in supporting Climate Change alarmism for their own financial benefit.
Americans Regain Their Appetite for Gas Guzzlers By MATT RICHTEL Setting aside concerns about global warming, consumers are unloading hybrid and electric vehicles in favor of bigger cars, pickups and S.U.V.s. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/s...column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news The Marshall Islands Are Disappearing EBEYE, MARSHALL ISLANDS — Linber Anej waded out in low tide to haul concrete chunks and metal scraps to shore and rebuild the makeshift sea wall in front of his home. The temporary barrier is no match for the rising seas that regularly flood the shacks and muddy streets with saltwater and raw sewage, but every day except Sunday, Mr. Anej joins a group of men and boys to haul the flotsam back into place. “It’s insane, I know,” said Mr. Anej, 30, who lives with his family of 13, including his parents, siblings and children, in a four-room house. “But it’s the only option we’ve got.” At least 26 in West Va from floods. Precip levels in single event storms are increasing due to man made global warming. What Climate Change Looks Like: Miami’s$300 Million Pumps 2015-12-10T17:43:32-05:00December 10, 2015 This week, we’re featuring images that show the varied ways that global warming has affected the world. The impact of climate change is usually gauged by metrics likefractions of degrees of warming or millimeters of sea-level rise. But the effects can also be measured in cash. Miami Beach is a case in point. The city, built on a barrier island, is spending $300 million to hold off the sea. Researchers at the University of Miami have been carefully measuring sea levels at Virginia Key, just south of Miami Beach, for nearly two decades, and say that in that time the sea has risen nearly four inches. For Miami Beach, that has exacerbated an existing problem – flooding of low-lying streets in South Beach and other neighborhoods during extreme high tides. The $300 million will eventually buy 60 large pumps, each of which can throw 14,000 gallons of water back into Biscayne Bay per minute, or roughly the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool every three-quarters of an hour. So far Miami Beach has installed pumps in the neighborhoods that are hardest hit during the extreme tides. But as the sea continues to rise – forecasts are for levels in South Florida to be as much as three feet higher by the end of the century – the flooding will spread to other neighborhoods, so eventually there will be pumps throughout the city.