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but Iran has nukes
He stands by a post that indicates the furthest point the Exit Glacier reached before beginning its recess, and said:
http://news.yahoo.com/obama-tours-gl...220251889.html
"This is as good of a signpost of what we're dealing with when it comes to climate change as just about anything,"
This publication includes a chart that indicates when, and how far the glacier has retreated (bottom of last page):
http://www.nps.gov/kefj/learn/nature...%20Glacier.pdf
World on track for warming 'far above' 2C target
Inadequate national targets for curbing climate-altering greenhouse gases meant emissions would be "far above" the level required to stave off disastrous global warming, analysts warned Wednesday.
Instead of the UN-targeted ceiling of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of average warming over pre-Industrial Revolution levels, the world was on track for 2.9-3.1 C by 2100, according to the Climate Action Tracker (CAT), a tool developed by a consortium of four research organisations.
"The climate targets so far submitted to the UN by governments collectively lead to global emissions far above the levels needed to hold warming to below 2 C," said a CAT statement.
So far, 56 governments have submitted pledges, known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs, to a UN roster that will form the backbone of a universal climate-rescue pact to be signed in Paris in December.
Including major emitters China, the United States and the 28-member European Union, the pledges cover 65 percent of global emissions, and 43 percent of the world population.
To stay under the 2 C threshold, which scientists say is necessary to avoid worst-case scenario global warming, greenhouse gas emissions would have to drop from about 50 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e) per year today, to 39-43 GtCO2e in 2025 and 36-45 GtCO2e in 2030, according to the CAT.
Containing warming to an even safer 1.5 C would require emissions of 38 GtCO2e in 2025 and 32 GtCO2e in 2030. The world has already warmed up by 0.8 C—nearly half the 2 C target.
"The current INDCs lead to emissions levels that exceed the benchmark 2 C limit by 12-15 GtCO2e in 2025, and 17-21 GtCO2e in 2030," said the CAT statement.
The CAT based its analysis on an assessment of 16 pledges representing 64.5 percent of global emissions in 2010, and 41 percent of Earth's population.
Current targets for 2030 would make the 2 C goal "almost infeasible", it found.
http://phys.org/news/2015-09-world-t...-analysts.html
Obama channels his inner Al Gore
“If we do nothing, temperatures in Alaska are projected to rise between six and 12 degrees by the end of the century, triggering more melting, more fires, more thawing of the permafrost, a negative feedback loop, a cycle – warming leading to more warming – that we do not want to be a part of."
Mmmmmkay
Darrin channels his innerdumb with mindless equivocating.
GORE! OBAMA! I LOOK LIKE A PARTISAN DUMB !
Republicans Engage in More Treason to Undermine the President on Climate Change
The Republicans have become used to treason, first undermining President Obama’s efforts toward a negotiated nuclear settlement with Iran, and now, as Politico reports, his goal of a climate change agreement:
Top Republican lawmakers are planning a wide-ranging offensive — including outreach to foreign officials by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office — to undermine President Barack Obama’s hopes of reaching an international climate change agreement that would cement his environmental legacy.
This is not entirely new. As far back as this spring, McConnell very publicly addressed foreign nations when, during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing, he told EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy,:
One final point: You have assured international officials that the U.S. is serious about imposing climate change regulations. I’d say what we have learned from your recent time on Capitol Hill is this is not the case. I would remind you that the Executive Branch is only one-third of the U.S. government. The Congress, of course, didn’t pass Cap and Trade back in 2009 and 2010 when the Democrats had very large majorities here. So, the failure of Congress to sign off should signal to other countries that they should proceed with caution into the December 2015 climate talks in Paris.
It is one thing to cast doubts and misinformation at home. Republicans have been doing that for decades. They are even within their legal rights to try to block legislation in Congress. But it is entirely another matter altogether if they subvert the president’s will by working with foreign governments to accomplish their goal.
Apparently feeling that earlier public warning was not enough of a betrayal, that is precisely what “a top policy aide” to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Neil Chatterjee, has been up to, according to Environment & Energy News:
GOP Senate staff, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) energy aide Neil Chatterjee, has been reaching out to foreign officials over the past months to warn that the White House’s pledges of emissions reductions and aid dollars won’t withstand congressional opposition — and especially the possible election of a new Republican president. E.U. members who have been among the strongest proponents of a stringent deal in Paris this year were on their call list
President Obama has big plans for the Paris climate conference, the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11), otherwise known as “Paris 2015,” which runs from November 30th to December 11th.
According to the conference’s official website,
COP21 will be a crucial conference, as it needs to achieve a new international agreement on the climate, applicable to all countries, with the aim of keeping global warming below 2°C. France will therefore be playing a leading international role to ensure points of view converge and to facilitate the search for consensus by the United Nations, as well as within the European Union, which has a major role in climate negotiationsIn March, the White House lauded the the Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) submission by Mexico’s President Peña Nieto, saying, “Mexico’s submission is in keeping with the Lima Decision calling on all parties to submit their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions well in advance of COP21 in Paris this December. We hope that Mexico’s actions will encourage other economies to submit INDCs that are ambitious, timely, transparent, detailed, and achievable.”
So Republicans are subverting not only their own president but the world. The G-7 Leaders’ Declaration, issued at Schloss Elmau, Germany, of June 8, 2015, stated,
The UN Climate Conference in Paris COP 21 is crucial for the protection of the global climate, the UN summit in New York will set the universal global sustainable development agenda for the years to come and the Third International Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa will support the implementation of the Post-2015 Development Agenda. We want to provide key impetus for ambitious results. “Think ahead. Act together.” – that is our guiding principle.
Think together. Act together.
Unless you’re a Republican. Then you plot and act against the collective will of the international community. Not with facts and science, but by casting doubt on their own country, betraying not only their president but the people who elected them to toffice.
While Obama’s climate plan fact sheet stressed “increasing awareness of the global challenges in addressing climate change in advance of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)’s 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21),” Republicans stress subverting efforts to combat climate change at COP21.
E&E-News reports that Jake Schmidt, who directs the international program for the Natural Resources Defense Council, “said it was ironic that after years of arguing EPA would act alone if it tackled climate change, Republicans now seem to be trying to persuade other countries not to cooperate.”
“Now McConnell’s strategy has shifted to ‘Since those countries are moving ahead, we’re going to try to undercut the international efforts because the U.S. isn’t trustworthy.'”
So here we are with the world on fire, and Republicans are playing politics.
We are presented with the hottest year on record year after year, each hotter than the last. The ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, drought and wildfire plague the West, with an area the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined now burned to ashes, the Forest Service is spending $200 million EACH WEEK to fight the blazes, and the Republicans are playing politics.
Anything to stop Obama and help their rich friends subvert every attempt to save our planet and keep it habitable for our children.
Even treason.
http://www.politicususa.com/2015/09/...iticus+USA+%29
Obama Has Done More for Clean Energy Than You Think
The most important thing the Obama administration has done to combat climate change may not end up being raised fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks or even its Clean Power Plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
The most important thing may turn out to be the loans that enabled large power facilities that run on sunshine or Earth's heat to break ground out west, wind farms to be built from coast to coast and construction of the nation's first brewery for biofuels not made from food—as well as a host of other advanced manufacturing energy projects.
The loan program got its start a full decade ago with the Energy Policy Act of 2005—legislation that aimed to provide incentives to produce energy in the U.S., whether by drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico or building new power plants. Only companies with established credit histories, however, like utility giant Southern Co., could take advantage of the loan program created by that bill. Companies behind new, alternative energy projects, like electric-carmaker Tesla Motors, typically did not have the benefit of such track records, however. As a result, almost no one applied for a loan.
So in 2009, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to deal with the economic fallout of the Great Recession, the loan program got new terms. Most importantly, the federal government agreed to take more of the financial risk for renewable energy projects. The result was a stampede of applications. "There were hundreds of applications and 15 people working as hard as they possibly could when I got there," recalls Jonathan Silver, who became head of the LPO in 2009 and is now a managing director at Tax Equity Advisors and a clean-energy investor and consultant. "We were building this car as we drove it, which is not easy."
The loan program still required innovative technology, defined as "new or significantly improved technologies as compared with commercial technologies" (with commercial defined as used in three or more other projects over more than five years), but suddenly had a lot more money, specifically some $16 billion to loan before September 2011 on top of the $56 billion already available. The program also had the full expertise of the Energy Department to evaluate projects and help new technologies overcome the hurdles to commercialization, often dubbed the "valley of death" by those in the finance and tech industries. Those innovations range from the basic layout of solar farms of more than 100 megawatts to storing sunshine in molten salts and using lens to concentrate it and improve photovoltaic efficiency.
Between March 2009 and August 2010, when the window closed for new applications, the loan program received hundreds of submissions.
By September 2011, the $16 billion had been loaned to various renewable energy projects.
An additional $16 billion in loans, guarantees or commitments have been made since then, including $8 billion to help build the nation's first new nuclear reactors in more than 30 years in Georgia.
The biggest challenge the loan program faced may not have been public criticism of failed deals like Solyndra, Fisker Automotive and Beacon Power or technology letdowns such as the Ivanpah solar-thermal power plant producing less electricity than expected. Rather, the biggest challenge came from within the Obama administration itself, particularly the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which stood athwart greater ambition. For example, one deal, dubbedSolarStrong, would have loaned $344 million to put solar panels on housing on military bases across the country. But OMB axed the deal because budget rules require it to assume that the Department of Defense might not have the appropriations to repay the loan in future decades. "At which point, all you can do is go home and have a scotch," Silver recalls.
That also means the loan program may have taken too little risk. The program has made a profit of nearly $1 billion in interest payments to the U.S Treasury to date. At least $5 billion more is expected over the next few decades as loans are paid back. That compares with $780 million in losses to date, the bulk of which is accounted for by the $535 million loaned to Solyndra.
And more money could be made if the program were to ever sell its group of loans rather than managing them for the next few decades.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_DD_20150908
Obama and his Exec branch kicking BigCarbon's and Repugs' asses.
Solyndra!
Benghazi!
Christmas card list!
email server!
Vince Foster!
Climate stalemate prompts call for world leaders to intervene
Act now to remove roadblocks and lay the groundwork for Paris climate deal, say experts including Kofi Anan as Bonn talks stumble
World leaders must step into the ongoing UN climate change negotiations, to remove roadblocks and ensure their negotiating teams can lay the groundwork for an agreement at landmark talk in December, an influential group of former leaders has urged.
The Elders - a group including former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, Graca Machel, the Mozambican politician and widow of Nelson Mandela, and Mary Robinson, formerly president of Ireland and a UN high commissioner – made their call on Friday, as the latest round of pre-Paris negotiations ended with many key issues left open. That stalemate leaves only five official negotiating days left before the Paris climate conference, at which governments are supposed to forge a new global climate change agreement to take effect from 2020.
“[This year] will conclude two of the most important international processes of our times [sustainable development goals, and a Paris agreement],” the group said, addressing heads of government. “You can prove to be a historic generation of leaders who will have a profound and positive impact that echoes through the century.”
World leaders are meeting late this month in New York, to discuss the UN’s proposed “sustainable development goals” aimed at lifting poor countries out of poverty and addressing social problems such as health and gender equity. Butglobal warming is also likely to be high on their agenda, with time running out before a crunch climate conference in Paris this December.
At the climate negotiations in Bonn, the latest in a series of pre-Paris talks that have been taking place at intervals since 2012, countries worked on a new form of text for the proposed Paris agreement. In this, the basic text of a legal form of agreement is separated from ancillary sections containing some of the most controversial issues, including questions surrounding the provision of finance to developing countries.
http://www.theguardian.com/environme...s-to-intervene
for this rightwingnut hate media -throwing asshole Stephen Miller, world history started 21 Jan 2009.
Everything, esp every Repug thing, before then is totally ignored, especially NEVER assume any Repug responsibility for the Repug destabilization of the Middle East and Africa.
Climate change has nothing to do with saving your kids from the boogeyman. It has everything to do with passing a global carbon tax scheme, a taxation on virtually all economic activity around the globe. And these carbon taxes will be managed by the financial markets (corrupt financial elites) as carbon credits are bought and sold, while you and yours deal with higher prices in virtually every facet of your life.
21st century slave masters with a willing slave class that transcends every color and every continent. The ultra wealthy who are clamoring for this , including the pope, have huge financial interests at stake in selling you into bondage via propaganda. A conflict which 90+% of global climate change believers are ignorant of, and which the proponents of "crisis averting action" are not disclosing.
And the vast majority of Americans cant think beyond fox and/or cnn propaganda. Welcome to idiocracy.
Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the pla udes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.
Edward L. Bernays,*Propaganda
Email list humor.
cold tolerance is genetic. President born in Kenya aren't acclimated to very cold weather and water.
He was born in Hawaii.
you mean all y'all birthers been lying to me?
Government Denies Requests to Extend Arctic Ocean Leases and Cancels Future Sales
Today, the United States Department of the Interior (DOI) announced that it denied requests made by S and Statoil for five-year extensions of Arctic Ocean leases and that it will not hold two scheduled sales in the region.
In 2014, S and Statoil submitted requests for “suspensions of operations” for their Arctic Ocean leases.
If granted, the requests would have extended the expiration of those leases by five years.
DOI previously denied a similar request made by ConocoPhillips.
Most of the leases held in the Beaufort Sea will expire in 2017, and leases held in the Chukchi Sea will expire in 2020.
A map of leases currently held in the U.S. Arctic Ocean is available here.
Chukchi Sea Lease Sale 237 was scheduled to be held in 2016, and Beaufort Sea Lease Sale 242 was scheduled to be held in 2017.
Those sales will not be held, and the government is currently considering whether to hold additional sales in the future.
The government’s decision comes after S announced last month that it would stop its Arctic Ocean operations for the foreseeable future.
The company’s Arctic exploration program has cost billions of dollars and led to controversy and a series of mishaps culminating in the grounding of the drill rig Kulluk.
S is currently taking the last of its vessels out of Alaskan waters.
http://oceana.org/press-center/press...e0bK_&rd=1&t=1
Exxon, paying s 30 years to lie about, deny AGW, while waiting decades for the Arctic to melt so Exxon could drill.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...11444401234491
Antarctic sea ice hit 35-year record high Saturday
Antarctic sea ice has grown to a record large extent for a second straight year, baffling scientists seeking to understand why this ice is expanding rather than shrinking in a warming world.
On Saturday, the ice extent reached 19.51 million square kilometers, according to data posted on the National Snow and Ice Data Center Web site. That number bested record high levels set earlier this month and in 2012 (of 19.48 million square kilometers). Records date back to October 1978.
The increasing ice is especially perplexing since the water beneath the ice has warmed, not cooled.
“The overwhelming evidence is that the Southern Ocean is warming,” said Jinlun Zhang, a University of Washington scientist, studying Antarctic ice. “Why would sea ice be increasing? Although the rate of increase is small, it is a puzzle to scientists.”
In a new study in the Journal of Climate, Zhang finds both strengthening and converging winds around the South Pole can explain 80 percent of the increase in ice volume which has been observed.
“The polar vortex that swirls around the South Pole is not just stronger than it was when satellite records began in the 1970s, it has more convergence, meaning it shoves the sea ice together to cause ridging,” the study’s press release explains. “Stronger winds also drive ice faster, which leads to still more deformation and ridging. This creates thicker, longer-lasting ice, while exposing surrounding water and thin ice to the blistering cold winds that cause more ice growth.”
But no one seems to have a conclusive answer as to why winds are behaving this way.
“I haven’t seen a clear explanation yet of why the winds have gotten stronger,” Zhang told Michael Lemonick of Climate Central.
Some point to stratospheric ozone depletion, but a new study published in the Journal of Climate notes that computer models simulate declining – not increasing – Antarctic sea ice in recent decades due to this phenomenon (aka the ozone “hole”).
“This modeled Antarctic sea ice decrease in the last three decades is at odds with observations, which show a small yet statistically significant increase in sea ice extent,” says the study, led by Colorado State University atmospheric scientist Elizabeth Barnes.
A recent study by Lorenzo Polvani and Karen Smith of Columbia University says the model-defying sea ice increase may just reflect natural variability.
If the increase in ice is due to natural variability, Zhang says, warming from manmade greenhouse gases should eventually overcome it and cause the ice to begin retreating.
"If the warming continues, at some point the trend will reverse,” Zhang said.
However, a conclusion of the Barnes study is that the recovery of the stratospheric ozone layer – now underway – may slow/delay Antarctic warming and ice melt.
Ultimately, it’s apparent the relationship between ozone depletion, climate warming from greenhouse gases, natural variability, and how Antarctic ice responds is all very complicated. In sharp contrast, in the Arctic, there seems to be a relatively straight forward relationship between temperature and ice extent.
Related: Arctic sea ice has *not* recovered, in 7 visuals
Thus, in the Antarctic, we shouldn’t necessarily expect to witness the kind of steep decline in ice that has occurred in the Arctic.
“…the seeming paradox of Antarctic ice increasing while Arctic ice is decreasing is really no paradox at all,” explains Climate Central’s Lemonick. “The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land, while the Antarctic is land surrounded by ocean. In the Arctic, moreover, you’ve got sea ice decreasing in the summer; at the opposite pole, you’ve got sea ice increasing in the winter. It’s not just an apples-and-oranges comparison: it’s more like comparing apple pie with orange juice.”
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