Janesdiggo's List: Climate

• Water – not oil – has always been the most valuable resource in the West. Wars   have been fought over it, feuds maintained, and fortunes won or lost. Apart   from the Ogallala, the main source remains the Colorado River, flowing west   from the Rockies, its annual bounty of snow melt providing the drinking   water for Las Vegas, irrigation for California's Central Valley, and the   swimming-pools of Los Angeles. No one is surprised that the mighty Colorado   now runs dry before it reaches the Pacific, nor that climate change, with   falling rain and snow levels, spells potential disaster for the Sunshine   States. There are at least public controls over most of this water, even if   it is actually owned by corporations and very rich people with 'water   rights'.
• But Texas, true to its self-conscious style of 'rugged individualism', has no   such legal controls. It maintains its Wild West-era laws of 'right to   capture'. This means that if you have water under your land, or in a river   running through it, you can take and use as much of it as you like. You can   water the corn or the cows, or you can make a buck by selling it to the   nearest thirsty suburb. If you want to drain your land into desert, you may.
• Our water level is 10 per cent of what it was 30 years   ago, and we have to make up for that by technique. That means looking for   more yield from less water.'
• Evans has switched from corn, wheat and   cattle to cotton and sorghum, which makes oil and ethanol for fuel,
• They use less water, and he has   got rid of the cattle altogether. 'I don't want to drill more wells,' he   says. 'Why would I want to own a desert?'
• All may come to nought in the face of a threat that has nothing to do with   corn or beef, but everything to do with the American devotion to making   money at any cost. The Texas oil billionaire and corporate raider T Boone   Pickens is after their water. He is proving to be the ultimate test of their   free market gospel of the 'right to capture'.
• Ninety-five per cent of   Ogallala water is now used for agriculture, but Pickens plans to pipe it 250   miles to Dallas, expected to triple in size in 30 years, with a demand for   water far exceeding supply. Pickens is making the hottest of climate-change   bets: that water's value will rocket as it runs dry. One man's thirst is   another man's fortune. Irrigation farming would simply follow gold mining,   open-range ranching and oil drilling in the traditional cycle of boom and   bust. 'There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the   people who have the water want to sell it,' Pickens has said. 'That's the   blood, guts, and feathers of the thing.'
• Brent Connett, a policy analyst for the Texas Conservative   Coalition Research Institute, pushes the view that trading farming for   selling water is a 'right' upheld by 100 years of Texan law, and can only   bring new prosperity. 'The water business, if allowed to bloom,' he   believes, 'can be the advent of another multi-billion-dollar business that   will tremendously benefit all Texans, especially those who hold the rights   to the water in the Panhandle.'
• Will Allen, among the 'opt-out' owners with a 'spread' close to the Oklahoma   border, does not see it that way. 'In Kansas, the state owns the water – not   so in Texas,' he says. 'We own it, and we don't see why we should give up   our right to capture. We would be giving away property that belongs to us.'

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• From satellite data and climate models, scientists calculate that the two polar ice sheets are losing enough ice to raise sea levels by 1.3mm each year.

   

  Overall, sea levels are rising by about 3mm (0.12 inches) per year.

• On average, loss from the Greenland sheet is increasing by nearly 22Gt per year, while the much larger and colder Antarctic sheet is shedding an additional 14.5Gt each year.

   

  If these increases persist, water from the two polar ice sheets could have added 15cm (5.9 inches) to the average global sea level by 2050.
• Since 2007, several other research groups using different methods have concluded that a figure between one and two metres is likely - which would have profound consequences for island nations and countries with long, low coastlines such as Bangladesh.

• The new research combined two different methodologies.

   

  One calculates ice gain and loss through combining various types of satellite reading and data taken on the ground, for example the thickness of the ice sheet and the speed at which glaciers are moving.

   

  The second dataset comes from Nasa's Grace mission, which uses twin satellites to measure variations in the Earth's gravitational pull.

   

  Ice loss causes a fractional reduction in gravity at that point on the Earth's surface.

   

  Two years ago, this mission surprised some in the research community by showing that even the vast and frigid East Antarctic ice sheet was losing

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• Low levels of radiation have been detected well beyond Tokyo, which is 220 kilometres south of the Daiichi plant, but hazardous levels have been limited to the plant itself.

• Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation
• Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”
• Professor Muller. His climate-skeptic credentials are pretty strong: he has denounced both Al Gore and my colleague Tom Friedman as “exaggerators,” and he has participated in a number of attacks on climate research, including the witch hunt over innocuous e-mails from British climate researchers. Not surprisingly, then, climate deniers had high hopes that his new project would support their case.
• For years now, large numbers of prominent scientists have been warning, with increasing urgency, that if we continue with business as usual, the results will be very bad, perhaps catastrophic. They could be wrong. But if you’re going to assert that they are in fact wrong, you have a moral responsibility to approach the topic with high seriousness and an open mind. After all, if the scientists are right, you’ll be doing a great deal of damage.

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• Quickening climate change in the Arctic including a thaw of Greenland's ice could raise world sea levels by up to 1.6 meters by 2100, an international report showed on Tuesday.
• would add to threats to coasts from Bangladesh to Florida, low-lying Pacific islands and cities from London to Shanghai. It would also, for instance, raise costs of building tsunami barriers in Japan.
• The AMAP study, drawing on work by hundreds of experts, said there were signs that warming was accelerating. It said the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice free in summers within 30 to 40 years, earlier than projected by the IPCC.
• "There is evidence that two components of the Arctic cryosphere -- snow and sea ice -- are interacting with the climate system to accelerate warming," it said.

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• With this in mind, TransCanada, a Calgary firm, has proposed building a $7 billion pipeline, Keystone XL, to send 510,000 b/d of Albertan oil to refineries in Texas (see map). It already has a line of similar capacity, Keystone. The company says that the new one would pump $20 billion into the American economy and hand $5 billion in taxes to states on the route. Keystone XL would not only take more Canadian oil to America; via terminals on the Gulf of Mexico it could connect the tar sands with international markets as well. There are also plans to ship oil to Asia from Canada’s Pacific coast.
• Leaders of First Nations in British Columbia said they would prevent the pipeline from crossing their territories. The chiefs talked of “inevitable” spills, a threat to salmon runs and devastation of their way of life.
• Mining accounts for just over half of production. It will become less common as shallower reserves are exhausted. Extracting the deeper stuff is less ugly but also damaging. Typically it involves drilling wells to pump steam into the ground to melt the bitumen and make it easier to suck up to the surface. Heating the steam burns much natural gas, emitting CO2. Both methods, say the tar sands’ critics, threaten local rivers, poison fish, destroy the landscape, kill wildlife and pollute the air.
• David Schindler, an ecologist at the University of Alberta, has long been publishing peer-reviewed studies showing that airborne emissions from smokestacks on upgraders, which convert the bitumen into synthetic crude oil, have polluted the Athabasca, the giant river that flows through the tar sands. His findings gained more publicity in September, when he offered photographers deformed turbot and other species pulled from the river. The images prompted a federal investigation. “I’m surprised it wasn’t mounted on a block of bitumen,” said an oil executive of Dr Schindler’s piscine trophy.
• toxic lakes still cover 170 square kilometres (66 square miles) and will keep growing, according to the RSC. Some of them leach their waste into the ground, says Pembina, although how much is uncertain.
• Both the RSC’s report and another commissioned by the federal government, also released last month, demolished Alberta’s claims to have monitored the tar sands’ impact adequately. Regulators had “not kept pace with rapid growth” and the province’s environmental assessments had “serious deficiencies” leaving them below “international best practice”, the RSC said. The federal report rubbished the province’s water-monitoring, which involved handing the job to an industry body—putting the “fox in charge of the henhouse”, says Dr Schindler. After December’s reports both the federal and provincial governments promised new measures to improve monitoring, an admission that the current arrangements are inadequate. Yet Mr Kent, the federal environment minister, has flatly rejected Dr Schindler’s research into the pollution of the Athabasca.

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• In a major development today, official documents obtained though an Access to Information request by the Dominion newspaper exposed a nefarious “pan-European oil sands advocacy strategy” that is much more coordinated than previously understood.
• According to Martin Lukacs at the Dominion Paper, the Canadian government has carried out a secret plan to boost investment and keep world markets open for Alberta's filthy tar sands oil. Their strategies include collaboration with major oily allies to aggressively undermine European environmental measures.

• I don't think there has ever been a collapse of an intellectual edifice comparable to this, maybe, in history, at least I can't remember one. Interestingly, it has no effect. It just continues. Which tells you that it's serviceable to power systems
• The financial system tanked. The government, namely, the taxpayer, came in and bailed them out.
• Let's go to the environmental crisis. There's nobody around to bail you out. The externalities in this case are the fate of the species. If that's disregarded in the operations of the market system, there's nobody around who is going to bail you out from that. So this is a lethal externality.
• Huge amounts of federal money and corporate money went into highways, airports, anything that wastes fuel. That's basically the criterion
• Those plants that are being dismantled and the skilled workers in them, all that could be reconverted to producing high-speed rail right here.
• A group of scientists at MIT came out with a report about a year ago describing what they called the most comprehensive modeling of the climate that had ever been done. Their conclusion, which was unreported in public media as far as I know, was that the major scientific consensus of the international commission is just way off, it's much too optimistic; and if you add other factors that they didn't count properly, the conclusion is much more dire. Their own conclusion was that unless we terminate use of fossil fuels almost immediately, it's finished. We'll never be able to overcome the consequences. That's not part of the debate.
• IN THE sciences, you're always going to find some people out at the fringes, maybe with good arguments but kind of at the fringes. But the overwhelming majority of scientists are pretty much agreed on the basic facts: that it's a serious phenomenon that's going to grow even more serious, and we have to do something about it
• the models the effect of melting of permafrost, which is beginning to happen. And it's pretty well understood that it's going to release a huge amount of methane, which is much more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide is, and that could set off a major change for the worse
• The United States has a very significant industrial policy and it's highly undemocratic. It's just that we don't call it that. So, for example, if you use a computer or you use the Internet or you fly in an airplane or you buy something at Wal-Mart, which is based on trade, which is based on containers, developed by the U.S. Navy, every step of the way you're benefiting from a massive form of industrial policy, state-initiated programs. It's kind of like driving on the interstate highway system. State-initiated programs where almost all the research and development and the procurement, which is a big factor in subsidizing corporations, all of this was done for decades before anything could go on to the market.
• Procurement is one of the major techniques of corporate subsidy. In fact, I think the first computer that actually went on the market was probably around 1978. That's about twenty-five years after they were developed. The Internet is about the same. And then Bill Gates gets rich. But the basic work was done with government support under Pentagon cover. The same with most of these things -- virtually the entire IT revolution. The Internet was in public hands for, I think, about thirty years before it was privatized.

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• • Not proof Wallis was involved ... smoke, but there maybe a fire
• On November 20th, 2009, somebody broke into a computer server at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, and stole thousands of emails and computer files.   The documents were leaked to Climate Change Deniers, and although exhaustive analysis later proved that the emails merely revealed scientists' anxiety that Climate Data and Research were being properly handled and studied, the Deniers have treated those emails as if they were a kind of Holy Grail of fraud.   They claim the emails not only disproved all of climate change, but also that they proved that scientists had doctored data in order to exaggerate the urgency of an international conference on climate change coming up the next month in Copenhagen in Denmark.
• As the corporations and lobbyists who sought to feed the myth that there is no man-made climate change disseminated, exploited and deliberately misinterpreted the stolen e-mails -- and used Fox News and other Murdoch enterprises as their principle venues -- the victims, the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, decided they'd better hire a public relations pro to help them fight back.  They hired… Neil Wallis.
• In the Murdoch Hacking Scandal, Wallis has already been shown to have been undermining the efforts of the people for whom he'd been hired to work -- the police.  In the Murdoch Hacking Scandal, Wallis has already been shown to have been feeding information from the investigators, to those being investigated.  In the Murdoch Hacking Scandal, Wallis has already been shown to have been working for Rupert Murdoch, long after he claimed he wasn't working for Rupert Murdoch.  And in the Murdoch Hacking Scandal, Wallis was an executive editor in charge of having people illegally hack phones, voicemails, and other electronic communications, and then publicizing the data and details that the hacking had produced.
• PC World Magazine reported that while we've all been working with a number of 3,870 hacking victims in the Murdoch Scandal, data released by Britain's Home Affairs Committee suggests the number may actually be as high as 12,800.
• He may be the man ultimately responsible for the illegal and inaccurate attempt to dismiss climate change as a scientific fraud.

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• Dr Funder and his team say their data shows a clear connection between temperature and the amount of sea ice. The researchers concluded that for about 3,000 years, during a period called the Holocene Climate Optimum, there was more open water and far less ice than today - probably less than 50% of the minimum Arctic sea ice recorded in 2007.
• But the researcher says that even with a loss of this size, the sea ice will not reach a point of no return.
• "I don't say that our current worries are not justified, but I think that there are factors which will work to delay the action in relation to some of the models that have been in the media.

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• “Inuit communities are encountering species their traditional languages don’t even have words for,” professor Jeremy Kerr of the University of Ottawa told the Star on Friday. “This is not a subtle effect.”
• “climate has changed earlier and more substantially in Canada than practically anywhere else on Earth.”
• Fellow ecobiologist Chris Thomas of the University of York, in research published in the current Science magazine, found that species are moving higher or farther north at a rate “two and three times faster than previously reported.”
• We are fundamentally changing the distribution of every animal and plant on the planet” with climate change. “We’re using the land to make sure it produces what we want.”

• starting perhaps at Sandbanks Provincial Park on the southern tip of Prince Edward County this weekend.

   

  “You’ll see tons of giant swallowtails absolutely everywhere. They weren’t there 10 years ago. This is the real world. Facebook is not the real world.”

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