Among the worst parts of climate anxiety is knowing full well that when the Earth ends up literally just being one giant ball of fire, the final tweets will be Republicans insisting there’s no climate crisis & Dems saying they can’t do anything because of the parliamentarian.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 28, 2021
The use of the word “Literally” here is accurate.
Portland, Oregon hit 114°F (45.5°C) Today.
If the death toll in the Pacific Northwest from high temperatures over this weekend is not in the thousands, I would be very surprised.
Even for houses with air-conditioning, this is likely to be more heat than they could handle:
Portland again reached a new record temperature late Sunday afternoon, hitting 112 degrees and breaking the previous records set earlier Sunday and Saturday, the National Weather Service announced on Twitter.
The high temperature for Portland International Airport reached 108 degrees Saturday, surpassing the city’s all-time record of 107, first set in 1965. By 2:20 p.m. Sunday afternoon, Portland had surpassed that record by three degrees. The record now stands at 112 as of 5 p.m. Sunday.
Portland normally has a handful of 90°F+ days a year.
In the 4 years that I lived in Portland, it never broke 100°F. (Update, Checked the record, I was wrong. From August 1976 through August 1980, there were 10 100°F+ days)
Obviously, this is weather, and not climate, but it is clearly anthropogenic climate change driven weather.
It happened in Verkhojansk, Eastern Siberia today.
Anthropogenic climate change is a bitch:
Newly published satellite imagery shows the ground temperature in at least one location in Siberia topped 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 degrees Celsius) going into the year’s longest day. It’s hot
SiberiaEarth summer, and it certainly won’t be the last.………
The 118-degree-Fahrenheit temperature was measured on the ground in Verkhojansk, in Yakutia, Eastern Siberia, by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel satellites. Other ground temperatures in the region included 109 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) in Govorovo and 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius) in Saskylah, which had its highest temperatures since 1936. It’s important to note that the temperatures being discussed here are land surface temperatures, not air temperatures. The air temperature in Verkhojansk was 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius)—still anomalously hot, but not Arizona hot.
But the ground temperature being so warm is still very bad. Those temperatures beleaguer the permafrost—the frozen soil of yore, which holds in greenhouse gases and on which much of eastern Russia is built. As permafrost thaws, it sighs its methane back into the atmosphere, causing chasms in the Earth.
………
The same region also suffered through a heat wave that led to a very un-Siberian air temperature reading of 100 degrees Fahrenheit(38 degrees Celsius) exactly a year ago to the day from the new freak heat. It’s the hottest temperature ever recorded in the region. It was also in the 90s last month in western Siberia, reflecting that the sweltering new abnormal is affecting just about everywhere. And it’s not just the permafrost suffering; wildfires last year in Siberia pumped a record amount of carbon dioxideinto the atmosphere, ensuring more summers like this are to come.
Even if we do all the right things, this is going to end up very poorly in the near to medium term, and we are doing NONE of the right things, so we are looking at a truly apocalyptic scenario.
Anthropogenic climate change is triggering a massive, and perhaps irreversible melting of Greenland’s ice fields.
It now appears that in addition to causing sea level rise, it appears that it is also triggering a massive release of mercury into the environment.
I had though at first that this was pollution from coal use over the past few hundred years, but this is far more extreme than would be predicted by this mechanism. It appears that much of this mercury is natural and has been sequestered by the ice:
Greenland’s melting ice sheet is unleashing an astonishing amount of mercury into the nation’s rivers and fjords.
Downstream of three glaciers in the southwest, researchers have found coastal ecosystems are swimming in high concentrations of the heavy metal, which can build up in the food web to toxic levels.
The quantity of mercury observed in three glacial rivers and three fjords in Greenland was among the worst in recorded history. In fact, researchers say the concentrations here are only matched by the polluted waterways of Industrial China, which overall produces about one-third of the world’s mercury pollution.
As Greenland’s glaciers continue to melt in line with our worst-case scenarios, experts are worried even more trapped mercury (Hg) could one day be released into the environment.
………
Previous studies have shown moderate mercury concentrations in run-off from melting glaciers, but the concentrations found in Greenland are two orders of magnitude higher than what scientists have found in other Arctic rivers.
“We didn’t expect there would be anywhere near that amount of mercury in the glacial water there,” says climate scientist Rob Spencer from Florida State University (FSU).
“Naturally, we have hypotheses as to what is leading to these high mercury concentrations, but these findings have raised a whole host of questions that we don’t have the answers to yet.”
………
If the hunch is right, Greenland may very well be a neglected hotspot of natural mercury emissions, which have been trapped in ice for millennia. Even if we curb industrial mercury emissions tomorrow, the rapid melting of all this ice could sabotage human efforts to reduce pollution from this heavy metal to safe levels.
………
“But mercury coming from climatically sensitive environments like glaciers could be a source that is much more difficult to manage.”
Given that Greenland is a major exporter of seafood, and the region is home to precious marine ecosystems, we’d best find out what’s going on.
The study was published in Nature Geoscience.
The fact that this may be a natural source is potentially even more concerning, because it can be far more extreme and unpredictable.
We are in for a bumpy ride.
Yet again, we have the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season before the start of the season on June 1.
Ana shouldn’t get particularly strong, but it’s the 7th year in a row that we have had a named storm before the start of th season.
Anthropogenic climate is change, and we are getting hammered by it today.
It’s only going to get worse:
Although Ana has some tropical characteristics, it is considered “subtropical” because it is associated with a low-pressure system in the upper atmosphere, and its maximum winds are located farther from its center. Ana should not strengthen significantly above its current maximum of 45 mph winds and should dissipate by early next week as it moves away from Bermuda.
Despite its relative weakness, Ana is notable for a couple of reasons. This is the seventh consecutive year, dating to 2015, in which a “named” storm has formed in the Atlantic basin—which includes the northern Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico—before June 1. The beginning of June traditionally marks the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season.
Due to this trend toward earlier storms, which is at least partly attributable to climate change and the Atlantic Ocean warming earlier, the US government’s National Hurricane Center has considered moving the start date of the season to May 15. However, in something of a compromise, the agency decided to begin forecasting storms earlier but not declare an earlier official start.
“To provide more consistent information on the potential for late May and early June systems,” the agency said, it would begin to provide tropical weather outlooks four times daily, beginning on May 15.
Those outlooks have been needed this year. In addition to Ana, forecasters tracked another disturbance on Friday and early Saturday in the Gulf of Mexico that showed some signs of organizing. However, it moved inland, into the Central Texas coast, early on Saturday before attaining status as a tropical depression.
This is not going to end well.
At the core of Cap and Trade carbon controls is trading of tax credits, and the creation and trading of tax credits is a function which actively encourages fraudulent behavior.
Case in point is the Massachusetts Audubon Society, which announced its intention to log thousands of acres that it was preserving in western Massachusetts so that it could then sell credits for not chopping down the trees.
Of course, it never actually intended to chop down these cheese, this was just a way to create carbon credits that had no basis in reality, and then sell them to polluting business, with no actual reduction in emissions.
In addition to the Mass Audubon Society, the Nature Conservancy is notorious for its sale of meaningless carbon offsets:
The Massachusetts Audubon Society has long managed its land in western Massachusetts as crucial wildlife habitat. Nature lovers flock to these forests to enjoy bird-watching and quiet hikes, with the occasional bobcat or moose sighting.
But in 2015, the conservation nonprofit presented California’s top climate regulator with a startling scenario: It could heavily log 9,700 acres of its preserved forests over the next few years.
The group raised the possibility of chopping down hundreds of thousands of trees as part of its application to take part in California’s forest offset program.
Spoiler, the never intended to log this land. They are engaging in a humbug.
The environmental organization has become a bunch of snollygosters.
………
The Air Resources Board accepted Mass Audubon’s project into its program, requiring the nonprofit to preserve its forests over the next century instead of heavily logging them. The nonprofit received more than 600,000 credits in exchange for its promise. The vast majority were sold through intermediaries to oil and gas companies, records show. The group earned about $6 million from the sales, Mass Audubon regional scientist Tom Lautzenheiser said.
On paper, the deal was a success. The fossil fuel companies were able to emit more CO2 while abiding by California’s climate laws. Mass Audubon earned enough money to acquire additional land for preservation, and to hire new staff working on climate change.
But it didn’t work out as well for the climate, unless Mass Audubon actually intended to start acting more like a timber company. The project wouldn’t achieve anywhere near the claimed levels of reduced carbon emissions if the nonprofit was getting credits for forests that were never in danger of aggressive logging. And every time a polluter uses a credit that didn’t actually save a ton of carbon, net emissions go up, undermining the point of the program.
………
New research by the San Francisco nonprofit CarbonPlan provides evidence that this is occurring: It shows that landowners in the program routinely maximize the number of trees they assert they could chop down if they weren’t given carbon credits, even if they have little history of logging or have mission statements in sharp opposition to such practices.
The research suggests the program could be significantly exaggerating the amount of carbon savings achieved.
“The nearly universal pattern we see in the data,” said Danny Cullenward, policy director at CarbonPlan and a coauthor of the study, corroborates concerns that “those projects are not delivering real climate benefits.”
(emphasis mine)
If you have direct tax on carbon, you eliminate this sort of fraud, what’s more you can treat the carbon tax in the same way that a value added tax is, and refund upon export, and charge upon import, so as to make sure that bad actors on global warming don’t get an effective subsidy for that bad behavior.
In the first half of 1969, I was living in Anchorage, Alaska.
On June 14, 1969, Anchorage hit was was then the highest temperature ever recorded up to that time, 85°F (29°C).
Note that Anchorage is 372 miles (599 km) south of the Arctic Circle.
Today, in it hit 86.5°F (30.3°C) in Nizhnyaya Pesha, just north of the Arctic Circle.
We are completely screwed:
It’s only May, but it feels like summer has arrived in my hometown of Baltimore. Since I woke up, I’ve been counting the hours until I can drink iced cocktails on my deck while wearing a sundress. Can you blame me? It’s 80 degrees Fahrenheit (26.7 degrees Celsius) out.
There’s another reason I really need a drink, though: That’s the same temperature it is in the Arctic today. Welcome to climate hell.
In fact, parts of the Arctic circle got even warmer than that on Wednesday. It was 86.5 degrees (30.3 degrees Celsius) in the Russian town of Nizhnyaya Pesha, and 91 degrees Fahrenheit (32.3 degrees Celsius) in the nearby town of Kolezma. The wildly high temperatures came as part of an ongoing heat wave in the region.
According to meteorologist Scott Duncan, these temperatures are between 37 and 43 degrees Fahrenheit (20 to 24 degrees Celsius) hotter than the region’s average temperature for this time of year. As Duncan said on Twitter, this Arctic heat is “truly exceptional for any time of the year but mind-boggling for May.” But though they’re bizarre, they’re also a sign of the broader changes happening in the Arctic, which is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the globe.
I have a suggestion: Let’s send all the anthropogenic climate change deniers to a penal colony in Nizhnyaya Pesha for the rest of their lives.
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has come to the conclusion that the Gypsy cab companies like Uber and Lyft are dysproportionally responsivle for greenhouse gas emissions in the state, and so they are looking to pass a rule mandating electric vehicle adoptions by those companies.
Uber and Lyft want public subsidies to follow the law.
The response of California should be to tell them to go Cheney themselves:
California clean-air regulators want nearly all trips on Uber and Lyft ride-hailing platforms to be in electric vehicles, mandating costly measures that the companies call unrealistic without more public subsidies for EVs.
………
And yet the firms are pushing back on the CARB effort to force the transition, arguing taxpayers should shoulder much of the burden.
………
Uber and Lyft say they can’t afford the EV transition either. Uber said in a December letter to CARB that, without “sufficient” subsidies, the rule would unduly burden the companies, along with their drivers and consumers.
Uber and Lyft have already proved that they are an enemy of good government (Proposition 22), let them pay their own way.
It turns out that photovoltaic solar energy has gone from one of the most expensive electricity sources to one of the cheapest in the the past few years.
Rather unsurprisingly, there has been no such drop in the cost of nuclear power.
Increasingly, fossil fuel generators are not competitive, which should help with our climate change problem:
In the year 2000, the International Energy Agency (IEA) made a prediction that would come back to haunt it: by 2020, the world would have installed a grand total of 18 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar capacity. Seven years later, the forecast would be proven spectacularly wrong when roughly 18 gigawatts of solar capacity were installed in a single year alone.
………
“When I got this job in 2005, I thought maybe one day solar will supply 1% of the world’s electricity. Now it’s 3%. Our official forecast is that it will be 23% by 2050, but that’s completely underestimated,” Chase says.
“We’ve got to the point where solar is the cheapest source of energy in the world in most places. This means we’ve been trying to model a situation where the grid looks totally different today.”
………
“The International Energy Agency now says solar is providing the cheapest energy the world has ever seen. But we’re headed towards a future of insanely cheap energy.
“Inanely cheap energy.”
I like the sound of that.
Snow and cold weather has hit Texas hard, and because of what can only be called high Texas idiocy, the power grid has collapsed.
So, the answer to the question, “Has privatization failed Texas utility customers?,” is F%$# yes.
In order to evade federal regulation the Texas electricity grid is largely separate from the rest of the country, and because it is Texas, suppliers of both natural gas, used to make electricity, and the electricity generators, make more profit from shutting down their plants to spike the prices.
This is what caused the California energy crisis in 2000 and 2001, deregulatory mania leading to market manipulation:
Privatizers use the one-size-fits-all economic theory of “retail choice-free market competition” to promote the deregulation of Texas electric utilities. Privatizers promise that lower electricity prices and higher system reliability will follow electric utility deregulation. Privatizers’ sloganeering convinces on-the-take politicians and the unsuspecting electorate to approve their lobbyist-written deregulation rules and laws.
Privatizers say the deregulation of Texas electric utilities is successful and other states should follow suit. This is misinformation. Relative electricity prices have increased dramatically, and dangerously lower electrical system reliability is the result of Texas electric utility deregulation in 2002.
But Texans, and Trotskyites, are never ones to let facts get in the way of their free market mousketeer theories, so Texas Governor Greg Abbot is claiming that the problem has come from renewables like wind and solar being disproportionately impacted by the weather.
It is a nice theory. The problem is that it is complete bunk:
Frozen wind turbines in Texas caused some conservative state politicians to declare Tuesday that the state was relying too much on renewable energy. But in reality, the wind power was expected to make up only a fraction of what the state had planned for during the winter.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas projected that 80% of the grid’s winter capacity, or 67 gigawatts, could be generated by natural gas, coal and some nuclear power.
An official with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said Tuesday afternoon that 16 gigawatts of renewable energy generation, mostly wind generation, were offline. Nearly double that, 30 gigawatts, had been lost from thermal sources, which includes gas, coal and nuclear energy.
By Wednesday, those numbers had changed as more operators struggled to operate in the cold: 45 gigawatts total were offline, with 28 gigawats from thermal sources and 18 gigawatts from renewable sources, ERCOT officials said.
“Texas is a gas state,” said Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
While Webber said all of Texas’ energy sources share blame for the power crisis, the natural gas industry is most notably producing significantly less power than normal.
“Gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now,” Webber said.
………
He went on to note the shutdown of a nuclear reactor in Bay City because of the cold and finally got to what energy experts say is the biggest culprit, writing, “Low Supply of Natural Gas: ERCOT planned on 67GW from natural gas/coal, but could only get 43GW of it online. We didn’t run out of natural gas, but we ran out of the ability to get natural gas. Pipelines in Texas don’t use cold insulation —so things were freezing.”
This was compounded by looting from the various energy suppliers.
It actually pays for them to have a significant amount of their generation capacity go offline, as shown by this anecdote:
As a historic winter storm raged across Texas over the weekend, Akilah Scott-Amos received an alarming message from her power company: Please switch services because “prices are about to explode.”
The 43-year-old owner of an organic skincare and apothecary shop was initially confused by the message from Griddy, which sells wholesale power for a monthly membership, but she began to look for other providers.
Then she checked her bill.
“I paid $450 for one day. I was in shock,” Scott-Amos told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “It made no sense because we have a gas heater, a gas fireplace, and we have been keeping the temperature around the house at 65 degrees. With that amount of money, and the labeled amount of usage Griddy said was used—we would have to be lighting up the whole neighborhood.”
The nightmare only got worse on Monday, when she realized her bill had increased by another $2,500. In comparison, Scott-Amos paid $33.93 last year for the entire month of February.
The cost per kWh went from a bit more than 2¢ to more than $2.
………
But data from ERCOT suggests the price of getting the lights back on might be too steep for some Texans. As first reported by Reuters, the market prices on the power grid spiked more than 10,000 percent on Monday in the aftermath of the deep freeze. Prices skyrocketed to more than $9,000 per megawatt-hour—compared to the pre-storm prices of less than $50 per hour.
The amped-up wattage costs have affected Griddy customers in particular because of the company’s distinctive business model. In Texas’ hypercharged market for electricity, Griddy makes money by debiting its subscribers a flat $9.99 monthly fee—and then selling them raw power at its going wholesale value, effectively stripping out any insulation between consumers and the oscillations in supply and demand.
New business models and cute names translating into ripping off consumers, yeppers, there’s a deregulated market.
It’s just another excuse to pick your pocket.
It ain’t the weather, it’s the corruption.
California State Assemblyman Adam Gray demanded an expensive and potential paralyzing audit of the California Air Resources Board, in what was a blatant attempt to hamstring the organization.
Environmentalists, and anyone with two brain cells to rub together, suggested that he was doing the bidding of lobbyists.
Mr. Gray denied that he was carrying water for the fossil fuel industry, but it turns out that not only was he metaphorically carrying their water, he was literally carrying their letter.
Metadata from the document showed that it had been drafted by a lobbyist:
………
“I think the environmentalists are going to point you over here and say he’s taking oil money, he’s trying to block the program,” Gray said in an interview. “I’m not trying to block the program. I’m for fighting climate change.”
But in pushing for the audit, Gray got a big assist from the oil industry. The industry’s main lobbyist wrote the request.
Metadata in the Microsoft Word document in the draft request obtained by the Los Angeles Times shows that its author is Eloy Garcia. Garcia is the lead lobbyist for the Western States Petroleum Assn. or WSPA, which represents oil companies in Sacramento.
The letter that Gray and more than a dozen other lawmakers sent to the Joint Legislative Audit Committee on Aug. 4 was word for word the same as Garcia’s draft.
First, Adam Gray is completely, and most deservedly, owned.
Second, how many times does this have to happen before people get a clue?
Information on removing the metadata is a quick Google search away.
Guess whose home was just flooded in an act of God.
Using Mr. Perkin’s logic, it clearly means that he is closeted, because otherwise, his home would not have been flooded:
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an organization labeled an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, was left homeless by the destructive flooding that has ravaged southern Louisiana this week, killing 11 people and destroying an estimated 40,000 homes.
Perkins, who has claimed that God uses natural disasters such as hurricanes and flooding to punish people for sinning (in particular homosexuals and their supporters), had his own home destroyed by the Lord Almighty. The hate group leader says he was forced to escape his destroyed home by canoe, reports JMG.
Perkins called into his own radio show to talk about the disaster of “biblical proportions” that, according to Perkins, will force his family to live in a camper for the six months it will take to rebuild his home.
I don’t claim to be a pious man, or a spiritual man, or even a good man, so I can freely admit that this development amuses the hell out of me, particularly since this Elmer Gantry wannabe denies anthropogenic climate change, which was the proximate cause of the warming.
What a surprise, Peabody Energy, the biggest coal company in the country, has been bankrolling pretty much every nutty climate change denier they can find.
Who cares about the destruction of the world, we have profits to make:
Peabody Energy, America’s biggest coalmining company, has funded at least two dozen groups that cast doubt on manmade climate change and oppose environment regulations, analysis by the Guardian reveals.
The funding spanned trade associations, corporate lobby groups, and industry front groups as well as conservative thinktanks and was exposed in court filings last month.
The coal company also gave to political organisations, funding twice as many Republican groups as Democratic ones.
Peabody, the world’s biggest private sector publicly traded coal company, was long known as an outlier even among fossil fuel companies for its public rejection of climate science and action. But its funding of climate denial groups was only exposed in disclosures after the coal titan was forced to seek bankruptcy protection in April, under competition from cheap natural gas.
Environmental campaigners said they had not known for certain that the company was funding an array of climate denial groups – and that the breadth of that funding took them by surprise.
………
“The breadth of the groups with financial ties to Peabody is extraordinary. Thinktanks, litigation groups, climate scientists, political organisations, dozens of organisations blocking action on climate all receiving funding from the coal industry,” said Nick Surgey, director of research for the Center for Media and Democracy.
“We expected to see some denial money, but it looks like Peabody is the treasury for a very substantial part of the climate denial movement.”
Peabody’s filings revealed funding for the American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate lobby group which opposes clean energy standards and tried to impose financial penalties on homeowners with solar panels, as well as a constellation of conservative thinktanks and organisations.
I really hope that someone can find a way to send their executives to a federal PMITA prison.
They deserve it.
Who knew that my house would one day be beach front property:
Scientists ringing alarm bells about the melting of Antarctica have focused most of their attention, so far, on the smaller West Antarctic ice sheet, which is grounded deep below sea level and highly exposed to the influence of warming seas. But new research published in the journal Nature Wednesday reaffirms that there’s a possibly even bigger — if slower moving — threat in the much larger ice mass of East Antarctica.
The Totten Glacier holds back more ice than any other in East Antarctica, which is itself the biggest ice mass in the world by far. Totten, which lies due south of Western Australia, currently reaches the ocean in the form of a floating shelf of ice that’s 90 miles by 22 miles in area. But the entire region, or what scientists call a “catchment,” that could someday flow into the sea in this area is over 200,000 square miles in size — bigger than California.
Moreover, in some areas that ice is close to 2.5 miles thick, with over a mile of that vertical extent reaching below the surface of the ocean. It’s the very definition of vast.
Warmer waters in this area could, therefore, ultimately be even more damaging than what’s happening in West Antarctica — and the total amount of ice that could someday be lost would raise sea levels by as much as 13 feet.
………
The gist is that while Totten may be in a relatively stable configuration now, if it retreats far enough, then it can start an unstable backslide into deep undersea basins and unload a great deal of ice, raising seas first by close to a meter and then considerably more than that.
………
Scientists believe that Totten Glacier has collapsed, and ice has retreated deep into the inland Sabrina and Aurora subglacial basins, numerous times since the original formation of the Antarctic ice sheet over 30 million years ago. In particular, they believe one of these retreats could have happened during the middle Pliocene epoch, some 3 million years ago, when seas are believed to have been 10 or more meters higher (over 30 feet) than they are now.
A 10 meter sea level rise is end of the world sh%$, but clearly anthropogenic climate change is a hoax, because James Inhof threw a snow ball in the Senate.
Have you heard the latest update on anthropogenic climate chane?
It turns out that the month of February was completely off the charts:
Earth got so hot last month that federal scientists struggled to find words, describing temperatures as “astronomical,” ”staggering” and “strange.” They warned that the climate may have moved into a new and hotter neighborhood.
This was not just another of the drumbeat of 10 straight broken monthly global heat records, triggered by a super El Nino and man-made global warming. February 2016 obliterated old marks by such a margin that it was the most above-normal month since meteorologists started keeping track in 1880, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
NOAA said Earth averaged 56.08 degrees Fahrenheit (13.38 degrees Celsius) in February, 2.18 degrees (1.21 degrees Celsius) above average, beating the old record for February set in 2015 by nearly six-tenths of a degree (one-third of a degree Celsius).
The old record was set just last December and the last three months have been the most above-normal months on record, said NOAA climate scientist Jessica Blunden. And it’s not just NOAA. NASA, which uses different statistical techniques, as well as a University of Alabama Huntsville team and the private Remote Sensing System team, which measure using satellites, also said February 2016 had the biggest departure from normal on record.
These were figures that had federal scientists grasping for superlatives.
“The departures are what we would consider astronomical,” Blunden said. “It’s on land. It’s in the oceans. It’s in the upper atmosphere. It’s in the lower atmosphere. The Arctic had record low sea ice.”
“Everything everywhere is a record this month, except Antarctica,” Blunden said. “It’s insane.”
In the Arctic, where sea ice reached a record low for February, land temperatures averaged 8 degrees above normal (4.5 degrees Celsius), Blunden said. That’s after January, when Arctic land temperatures were 10.4 degrees above normal (5.8 degrees Celsius).
It was also the warmest winter—December through February—on record, beating the previous year’s record by more than half a degree (0.29 degrees Celsius).These were figures that had federal scientists grasping for superlatives.
“The departures are what we would consider astronomical,” Blunden said. “It’s on land. It’s in the oceans. It’s in the upper atmosphere. It’s in the lower atmosphere. The Arctic had record low sea ice.”
“Everything everywhere is a record this month, except Antarctica,” Blunden said. “It’s insane.”
In the Arctic, where sea ice reached a record low for February, land temperatures averaged 8 degrees above normal (4.5 degrees Celsius), Blunden said. That’s after January, when Arctic land temperatures were 10.4 degrees above normal (5.8 degrees Celsius).
It was also the warmest winter—December through February—on record, beating the previous year’s record by more than half a degree (0.29 degrees Celsius
Clearly man made global warming is a hoax.
Every major model for climate change as proven to be too conservative.
The reality has been worse, and it is likely to get worse.
).
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had her State Department aggressively push fracking across the world:
One icy morning in February 2012, Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they huddled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria’s bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes. But the focus of the talks was fracking. The previous year, Bulgaria had signed a five-year, $68 million deal, granting US oil giant Chevron millions of acres in shale gas concessions. Bulgarians were outraged. Shortly before Clinton arrived, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets carrying placards that read “Stop fracking with our water” and “Chevron go home.” Bulgaria’s parliament responded by voting overwhelmingly for a fracking moratorium.
Clinton urged Bulgarian officials to give fracking another chance. According to Borissov, she agreed to help fly in the “best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people.” But resistance only grew. The following month in neighboring Romania, thousands of people gathered to protest another Chevron fracking project, and Romania’s parliament began weighing its own shale gas moratorium. Again Clinton intervened, dispatching her special envoy for energy in Eurasia, Richard Morningstar, to push back against the fracking bans. The State Department’s lobbying effort culminated in late May 2012, when Morningstar held a series of meetings on fracking with top Bulgarian and Romanian officials. He also touted the technology in an interview on Bulgarian national radio, saying it could lead to a fivefold drop in the price of natural gas. A few weeks later, Romania’s parliament voted down its proposed fracking ban and Bulgaria’s eased its moratorium.
The episode sheds light on a crucial but little-known dimension of Clinton’s diplomatic legacy. Under her leadership, the State Department worked closely with energy companies to spread fracking around the globe—part of a broader push to fight climate change, boost global energy supply, and undercut the power of adversaries such as Russia that use their energy resources as a cudgel. But environmental groups fear that exporting fracking, which has been linked to drinking-water contamination and earthquakes at home, could wreak havoc in countries with scant environmental regulation. And according to interviews, diplomatic cables, and other documents obtained by Mother Jones, American officials—some with deep ties to industry—also helped US firms clinch potentially lucrative shale concessions overseas, raising troubling questions about whose interests the program actually serves.
………
Clinton, who was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, believed that shale gas could help rewrite global energy politics. “This is a moment of profound change,” she later told a crowd at Georgetown University. “Countries that used to depend on others for their energy are now producers. How will this shape world events? Who will benefit, and who will not?…The answers to these questions are being written right now, and we intend to play a major role.” Clinton tapped a lawyer named David Goldwyn as her special envoy for international energy affairs; his charge was “to elevate energy diplomacy as a key function of US foreign policy.”
………
Goldwyn had a long history of promoting drilling overseas—both as a Department of Energy official under Bill Clinton and as a representative of the oil industry. From 2005 to 2009 he directed the US-Libya Business Association, an organization funded primarily by US oil companies—including Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Marathon—clamoring to tap Libya’s abundant supply. Goldwyn lobbied Congress for pro-Libyan policies and even battled legislation that would have allowed families of the Lockerbie bombing victims to sue the Libyan government for its alleged role in the attack.
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But environmental groups were barely consulted, while industry played a crucial role. When Goldwyn unveiled the initiative in April 2010, it was at a meeting of the United States Energy Association, a trade organization representing Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and ConocoPhillips, all of which were pursuing fracking overseas. Among their top targets was Poland, which preliminary studies suggested had abundant shale gas. The day after Goldwyn’s announcement, the US Embassy in Warsaw helped organize a shale gas conference, underwritten by these same companies (plus the oil field services company Halliburton) and attended by officials from the departments of State and Energy.
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Around the time of his departure, WikiLeaks released a slew of diplomatic cables, including one describing a 2009 meeting during which Goldwyn and Canadian officials discussed development of the Alberta oil sands—a project benefiting some of the same firms behind the US-Libya Business Association. The cable said that Goldwyn had coached his Canadian counterparts on improving “oil sands messaging” and helped alleviate their concerns about getting oil sands crude to US markets. This embarrassed the State Department, which is reviewing the controversial Keystone XL pipeline proposal to transport crude oil from Canada and is under fire from environmentalists.
After leaving State, Goldwyn took a job with Sutherland, a law and lobbying firm that touts his “deep understanding” of pipeline issues, and launched his own company, Goldwyn Global Strategies.
In late 2011, Clinton finally unveiled the new Bureau of Energy Resources, with 63 employees and a multimillion-dollar budget. She also promised to instruct US embassies around the globe to step up their work on energy issues and “pursue more outreach to private-sector energy” firms, some of which had generously supported both her and President Barack Obama’s political campaigns. (One Chevron executive bundled large sums for Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid, for example.)
So Clinton, who at the Flint debates was using double-talk about common sense regulations, employed a energy industry lobbyist to run her policy of aggressively pushing fracking to the world.
Later in the article, they talk about how her pet lobbyist lobbied aggressively for Canadian tar sands at State.
Yes, she sure sounds like someone who is serious about the dangers of fracking and Canadian bitumen, and the associated problems with global warming, doesn’t she?
Everyone’s favorite oil spill pipeline company is suing the United States for stopping the pipeline:
TransCanada said on Wednesday that it would seek $15 billion in damages over the Obama administration’s decision to cancel the company’s Keystone XL pipeline project.
The company is taking the unusual step of suing through the North American Free Trade Agreement, calling the decision “arbitrary and unjustified.” The Canadian business also filed a lawsuit in Houston asking that the decision be overturned.
“TransCanada has been unjustly deprived of the value of its multibillion-dollar investment by the U.S. administration’s action,” the company said in a statement. “Rather, the denial was a symbolic gesture based on speculation about the (false) perceptions of the international community regarding the administration’s leadership on climate change.”
Seriously, just stop whining.
It’s December 14th, and it is 65°F (18°C).
This is crazy, and we WILL pay for this on January and February.
Obama has just told TransCanada “No Backsies”.
It’s about bloody time:
The White House on Tuesday said President Obama had no intention of bowing to a request from the company behind the Keystone XL oil pipeline to delay a decision on the project, saying he wanted to take action before his tenure ends.
The State Department is reviewing a request made on Monday by the company, TransCanada, to pause its yearslong evaluation of the proposed 1,179-mile pipeline, which has become part of a broader debate over Mr. Obama’s environmental agenda.
Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday that “there’s reason to suspect that there may be politics at play” in TransCanada’s request. He strongly suggested that the review, which has been widely expected to result in a rejection of the pipeline as soon as this month, remained on track.
“Given how long it’s taken, it seems unusual to me to suggest that somehow it should be paused yet again,” Mr. Earnest said about the evaluation at the State Department, which reviews proposed cross-border projects that require a presidential permit. The president, Mr. Earnest added, “would like to have this determination be completed before he leaves office.”
Environmental protection advocates say Mr. Obama is poised to reject the pipeline project in large part to make a bold statement about his commitment to curb climate change in advance of a United Nations summit meeting in Paris. He will seek to broker an accord at the December gathering, committing every nation to enacting new policies to counter global warming.
It would be nice if he hadn’t waited 6 years to start this.
They just requested that the State Department suspend its review of the Keystone XL pipeline:
The company seeking to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline asked the Obama administration on Monday to suspend its yearslong review of the project, potentially bringing an abrupt halt to a politically charged debate that had become part of a broader struggle over President Obama’s environmental policies.
It was not immediately clear whether the administration would grant the request, which was swiftly denounced by environmental activists as a bid to dodge a near-certain rejection of the pipeline. Allowing the delay would push off a decision until after the 2016 presidential election.
The company’s request introduced a new element of uncertainty into the administration’s decision-making process, offering the potential to free Mr. Obama from a politically difficult choice that has hung over much of his presidency. But if anything, it appeared to intensify pressure on him from crucial Democratic constituencies to reject the pipeline or risk being blamed for punting to another president. A delay would keep the issue alive in the presidential campaign.
TransCanada, the Alberta company seeking to build the 1,179-mile pipeline, made its request in a letter to the State Department, which must approve cross-border projects and had been reviewing its application for a presidential permit.
This is not a victory for the people, like me, who oppose the pipeline.
This is a tactical move to push any decision to the next administration, which the ratf%$#s at TransCanada is hoping that this will be a Republican, whose party has made approval of the transit of bitumen through the Ogallala Aquiferan article of faith.
