Some reading for the “anti-warmalists” and “climate-change deniers”

[reality]

...excellent, finally a world wide climate deal...that'll be $100 thanks...wasn't that bad was it?


Paris climate change deal will cost NZ households $100 a year - John Key

 Prime Minister John Key says Treasury officials were pushing for a less ambitious emissions target than the one New Zealand took to Paris.

Kiwi households will pay about $100 extra a year as part of New Zealand efforts to meet an ambitious new climate change target, Prime Minister John Key says.

The Paris agreement, reached after two weeks of negotiations, is the first to require all countries to tackle climate change and cut greenhouse gas emissions in a bid to limit global temperature rises to two degrees Celsius this century.

It also includes an aspirational goal of limiting rises to 1.5C, following lobbying from Pacific countries most likely to be hard-hit by rising temperatures and climate change.

Politicians and scientists have said New Zealand will have to "up its game" on climate change and make bigger emissions reductions if it is to meet the new goals.

Key told Radio NZ that increased use of renewable energy and the development of scientific solutions for agricultural emissions would both be important for New Zealand's efforts.
"We're 80 per cent at the moment in terms of electricity production, we want to get to 90 per cent by 2025 so we will have to do more.

"You will see a push towards electric cars, I think you are going to have to see, from New Zealand's point of view, a scientific solution to our agricultural emissions and frankly more happening in the commercial sector.

"There's a lot of changes there - they're all doable but we'll have to work on those."

Treasury advice was that each New Zealand household would pay an extra $1350 over 15 years, or just under $100 a year, in increased petrol, electricity and energy costs to help the country meet its target.

However, Key did not believe New Zealand needed to stop issuing oil exploration permits, saying production levels were low compared to the rest of the world and developing countries would still need fossil fuels for some time.

"New Zealand could of course just stop producing oil and gas and coal, but realistically if we did that I don't believe it would stop it being consumed - I think the rest of the world would just fill the very small gap we would leave."

While New Zealand has been criticised for some for an unambitious target on emissions reductions, Treasury officials and others had pushed for a "far less ambitious target" due to the relative expense of reducing our carbon footprint compared to other countries.

"Our view was OK, that's fine but that's not going to stack up in terms of credibility and I think New Zealanders will support either some changes or some costs."

 - Stuff

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

think its a good thing
then you're out of your mind

it's an agenda that is controlled by the ultra elite and equates to the loss of our sovereignty
to a bureaucratic world body of totalitarian globalist inbred scum.

Beam me up Scotty no sign of any intelligent life here

[reality]

"think its a good thing
then you're out of your mind "

..not really sure...but with the earths rapidly increasing population...pollution is and will be an ever increasing problem in the future...
..so the fact that most countries have signed up (about 190 countries I believe) is a positive sign that we are all in this together ..

..thing is ...on a per person basis...we in NZ are probably causing alot more pollution than people in developing countries...so the developed countries like us are going to have alot more expense....that's just fact...thats why I say...$100 seems to cheap..I thought it would be alot more......

...India is going to be starting a new coal fired power station every month until 2020...and China probably more...

...seems that whatever we reduce pollution by will be used up in a few weeks by those countries causing extra pollution on behalf of their population...which they are quite entitled to do to catch up to us...

...does it become a question of ..by what means will life on this planet cease to exist...pollution or war..or disease..or..whatever..
..but we can be assured that how ever it ends..it has all been in the name of evolution..which is  the only reason why we are here in the first place

..sounds like this agreement does not come into force until 2020...and then it's voluntary...makes you wonder how equitable it will be

....where is god when ya really need him

[reality]

..and we thought our problems were bad

Paris climate targets a tough ask for Australia without dramatic policy changes on coal
DECEMBER 14, 20156:41AM

Global climate deal struck in Paris

KARA VICKERYNews Corp Australia Network

THE CLIMATE Institute has welcomed the Paris climate change agreement, but warns without drastic action on coal fired power stations, Australia will fail to meet emissions targets prescribed by the deal.
It comes as the business community pledges to “step up to the plate” to help government achieve its targets — described by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop as ambitious.

The Climate Institute chief executive John Connor said while outcomes of the Paris summit were better than expected, coal fired power stations remained the “elephant in the room”.

“The Government and indeed the Australian Labor Party need to be more explicit about how we are going to replace our ageing and inefficient coal fired power stations with clean energy,” he said.

To meet targets mandated by the Paris agreement, Mr Connor said Australia would need to cut emissions by 60 per cent by 2030, instead of the 26 to 28 per cent target announced by the Abbott Government in August.
He said this would also require the phasing out of brown coal fired power stations much faster than was currently planned.

In what’s been described as an “historic” agreement, world leaders signed a binding accord at the end of the two-week Paris climate change summit yesterday.
The agreement vows to limit global warming to below 2C and requires parties to submit and review plans to slash emissions every five years in an attempt to meet an aspirational goal of constraining global warming to 1.5C.

Ms Bishop told reporters the targets were “ambitious” and would require hard work by Australia to achieve, but said it would not come at the expense of the economy.
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Kate Carnell said industry would happily “step up to the plate” to help government meet the challenging targets, as long as any policy changes didn’t hurt competitiveness.
“The great dilemma about Kyoto (summit) was that many countries made commitments and then didn’t really deliver on them,” Ms Carnell said.
“We’re pleased that these will be, hopefully, binding.”

Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox agreed addressing the competitiveness challenge was crucial.
“Previous climate negotiations have produced agreements that were either weak or had very few participants,” Mr Willox said in a statement.
“The Paris agreement is a strong start on a new approach — one that requires buy-in from every nation and asks them all to keep coming back to review progress and raise their ambition.”

Coal was the major fuel source for electricity generation in Australia in 2013—14, accounting for 61 per cent of the fuel mix, according to an Office of the Chief Economist report published last month.
news.com

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

It's official: 2015 ‘smashed’ 2014's global
temperature record. It wasn't even close.

By CHRIS MOONEY and JOBY WARRICK | 3:00PM - Wednesday, January 20, 2016



LAST YEAR shattered 2014's record to become the hottest year since reliable record-keeping began, two U.S. government science agencies announced on Wednesday in yet another sign that the planet is heating up.

2015's sharp spike in temperatures was aided by a strong El Niño weather pattern late in the year that caused ocean waters in the central Pacific to heat up. But the unusual warming started early and steadily gained strength in a year in which 10 of 12 months set records, scientists said.

The new figures, based on separate sets of records kept by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, could fuel debate over climate change in an election year in which the two main political parties remain divided over what to do about global warming and, indeed, whether it exists.

“2015 was by far the record year in all of the temperature datasets that are based on the instrumental and surface data,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, which made the announcement jointly with NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It really underlines the fact that the planet really is still warming, there is no change in the long term global warming rate, and we know why that is,” he said.

NASA reported that 2015 was officially 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit (0.13 degrees Celsius) hotter than 2014, the prior record year, a sharp increase for a global temperature record in which annual variation is normally measured in the hundredths of a degree. NOAA's figures showed slightly greater warming, of about 0.29 degrees Fahrenheit (0.16 degrees Celcius) hotter than 2014.

“A lot of times, you actually look at these numbers, when you break a record, you break it by a few hundredths of a degree,” said Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. “But this record, we literally smashed. It was over a quarter of a degree Fahrenheit, and that's a lot for the global temperature.”

Overall, NOAA said, 2015 was 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) above the 20th century average.

NASA and NOAA both keep independent global surface temperature datasets, measuring temperatures over both the land and the oceans using thermometers, ocean buoys and ship readings. The datasets do not always agree perfectly, but they showed relatively little disagreement this year, Schmidt said.

The latest record means that 2014 — the previous record year — only officially held that title for one year. 2014 came by its record by a relatively narrow margin — for instance, NASA gave 2014 a 38 percent chance of having been the warmest year on record, still reserving a nontrivial chance that the real warmest year had been 2010 or 2005. (NOAA gave a 48 percent chance that 2014 had, at the time, been the warmest year.)

This year, in contrast, there is little need for citing percentages or a statistical photo finish. Buoyed by a powerful El Niño event, 2015 shattered the 2014 record. NASA's Schmidt suggests there is only a 5 percent possibility that any other year on record was actually warmer.

Fifteen of the 16 hottest years on record have now occurred in this century, according to NASA.

U.S. officials stressed that the El Niño pattern alone does not account of the year's record warmth. “The interesting thing is that 2015 did not start with an El Niño,” Schmidt said. “It was warm right from the beginning.”

Because a strong El Niño still is in place, “2016 is expected to be an exceptionally warm year, and perhaps even another record,” Schmidt said.

The release of the 2015 temperature data prompted statements from leading Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Clinton, in a Twitter posting, said, “Climate change is real. It's hurting our planet and our people. We can't afford a president who ignores the science.”

The Sanders campaign also tweeted a response, saying. “Climate change is real and caused by human activity. This planet and its people are in trouble.”

There was no immediate comments from the major GOP contenders, several of whom have been openly skeptical of the mainstream scientific view that human activity is causing the planet to warm. Front-runner Donald Trump has dismissed climate change as a hoax.


This image obtained on November 16th, 2015, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows the satellite
sea surface temperature departure for the month of October 2015, where orange-red colors are above normal temperatures and are
indicative of El Niño. — Picture: NOAA/AFP.

According to the NOAA analaysis on Wednesday, every month in 2015 broke previous temperature records except for two: January and April. NOAA also announced Wednesday that for December, the “temperature departure from average was also the highest departure among all months in the historical record and the first time a monthly departure has reached 2°F.”

From a climate policy perspective, the warmth of 2015 is also highly significant. Global leaders in Paris agreed in December that the planet should not be allowed to warm 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures — and ideally, warming should be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius if possible. Based on 2015's temperature record, though, we're already half way to 2 degrees.

“This is the first year where the record is clearly above 1 degree Celsius above the 19th century,” said NASA’s Schmidt. NOAA's data also show that the planet is now more than 1 degree Celsius warmer than the average temperature between 1880 and 1899, said the agency's Karl.

2015's El Niño enhanced heat was accompanied by dramatic weather events across the globe, including a record for the number of Category 3 or greater tropical cyclones in the Northern Hemisphere. That tally includes Hurricane Patricia, the most intense hurricane ever recorded by the National Hurricane Center.

In some ways most ominously of all, 2015 was the year that scientists announced that an entirely new sector of Greenland — one containing over three feet of potential sea level rise — appeared to have been destabilized. The region is centered on the Zachariae and Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden glaciers of northeast Greenland, which together comprise the endpoint of the northeast Greenland ice stream, which drains 12 percent of the vast ice sheet.

2015's record warmth also included a major anomaly — very cold temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean to the south of Greenland. Monthly NOAA temperature maps repeatedly showed a blue colored “blob” of cold in this region, a development that is sparking increasing scientific interest, because of the suspicion that it could represent a sign of a change in the overturning circulation of the ocean.

“In the northern North Atlantic, temperatures were colder than normal, and that was really pretty much the only part of the world that had a sizeable area with below average temperatures,” Karl said.

It certainly isn't the case that the 2015 temperature record can be entirely attributed to the warming of the globe by human greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change has never meant that every successive year will be warmer than the next, and the powerful 2015 El Niño unlocked immense heat from the Pacific Ocean that drove up the global temperature.

But at the same time, 2015 was also considerably hotter than 1998, another major El Niño year that was, at the time, the hottest year on record. Now, in contrast, it's fifth or sixth on the list, depending on which agency you consult. And that, say experts, is how the warming of the planet makes itself felt.

“It's breaking the record because we also have this unusually strong El Niño, but at the same time we know the ocean is now absorbing two times more heat than around the last time we had a big El Niño, which is quite a while ago,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University.

There has been some talk in scientific circles that 2016 could be even hotter overall than 2015 — which would lead to three record years in a row. The reasoning here is that there is usually a significant lag between when El Niño peaks and when the warming of the globe does in its wake. Thus, 1998 was the hottest year of the 1997-1998 El Niño event.

Britain's Met Office recently forecast that 2016 could be “at least as warm, if not warmer” than 2015, in the words of research fellow Chris Folland.

“In previous El Niño years, they peak in the wintertime … [and] the warmest temperatures are in the subsequent year,” said NOAA's Karl.  “If 2016 continues like we've seen in the past, that would suggest 2016 is going to be very close to a record or even a new record.”

However, not all scientists agree. “My guess is that 2016 may not be warmer than 2015,” said Kevin Trenberth, a climate change and El Niño expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He thinks the current El Niño may already have begun to peak (or have peaked) and thus that the second half of 2016 may cool down again somewhat.

In 2015, record warm temperatures and a growing focus on addressing global warming seemed in curious sync. It was the year that Pope Francis released his historic encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si, and the year in which the United States moved to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from the generation of electricity, their largest single source.

Most significant, as heat records over the year accumulated, nations of the world assembled in Paris to forge a global climate agreement that will serve as the template for locking in cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in coming decades.

It's hard to say that 2015's warmth directly contributed to these human decisions, and yet it's also hard to entirely separate the two. The stark warming of the globe in 2015 clearly imparted a newfound sense of policy urgency.

“NASA has been talking about the existence of global warming in public since 1988,” said Schmidt. “1988 was also a record warm year for the time. Just so that people understand, it is now 23rd in the rankings.”

• Chris Mooney reports on science and the environment.

• Joby Warrick joined The Washington Post's national staff in 1996. He has covered national security, intelligence and the Middle East, and currently writes about the environment.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on environment issues:

 • New study finds ‘no substantive evidence’ of a global warming pause

 • Sorry, skeptics: NASA and NOAA were right about the 2014 temperature record

 • The Northern Hemisphere's record shattering tropical cyclone season by the numbers

 • PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY: Striking photos of extreme weather around the planet

 • Why some scientists are worried about a surprisingly cold ‘blob’ in the North Atlantic Ocean

 • Scientists say human greenhouse gas emissions have canceled the next ice age

 • Why clean energy is now expanding even when fossil fuels are cheap

 • Why we've been hugely underestimating the overfishing of the oceans

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/01/20/its-official-2015-smashed-2014s-global-temperature-record-it-wasnt-even-close

[reality]

...if my calculations are correct..in about 6 years..I will be able to grow mango's and pineapples in Northland, something to look forward to

[Crusader]

I may not need such a thick wetsuit when I go diving soon. Having to get into a 7.5mm merino wool lined wetsuit in the middle of Feb is pretty uncomfortable until you hit the water.

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Yet another example of global warming causing extreme weather events, as predicted by a majority of the world's climate scientists....




from The Washington Post…

• PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY: Deadly winter storm pounds the nation’s capital

Saturday, January 23, 2016


A person walks up a street during the snowstorm in Washington, D.C. — Photograph: Matt McClain/The Washington Post.


The winter storm affecting the East Coast is seen in a picture taken from the International Space Station. — Photograph: NASA/Reuters.


A Secret Service officer endures the blizzard while standing outside the White House. — Photograph: Linda Davidson/The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this topic:

 • One of the biggest storms in region's history brings Washington to standstill

 • D.C.'s corridor of power yields to a blizzard's force

 • Fatal storm wreaks havoc up and down East Coast

 • More than 10,000 flights canceled as storm shuts down subways, buses and roads

 • Even the U.S. military and White House defeated by this blizzard

[guest49]

Association sounds a bit weak there, old son!

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

Sun's Shifts May Cause Global Warming
Physicist says carbon dioxide's no big deal.

By Marion Long|Monday, June 25, 2007

Most leading climate experts don’t agree with Henrik Svensmark, the 49-year-old director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen. In fact, he has taken a lot of blows for proposing that solar activity and cosmic rays are instrumental in determining the warming (and cooling) of Earth. His studies show that cosmic rays trigger cloud formation, suggesting that a high level of solar activity—which suppresses the flow of cosmic rays striking the atmosphere—could result in fewer clouds and a warmer planet. This, Svensmark contends, could account for most of the warming during the last century. Does this mean that carbon dioxide is less important than we’ve been led to believe? Yes, he says, but how much less is impossible to know because climate models are so limited.

There is probably no greater scientific heresy today than questioning the warming role of CO2, especially in the wake of the report issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That report warned that nations must cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, and insisted that “unless drastic action is taken . . . millions of poor people will suffer from hunger, thirst, floods, and disease.” As astrophysicist ?Eugene Parker, the discoverer of solar wind, writes in the foreword to Svensmark’s new book, The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, “Global warming has become a political issue both in government and in the scientific community. The scientific lines have been drawn by ‘eminent’ scientists, and an important new idea is an unwelcome intruder. It upsets the established orthodoxy.”

We talked with the unexpectedly modest and soft-spoken Henrik Svensmark about his work, the criticism it has received, and truth versus hype in climate science.

Was there something in the Danish weather when you were growing up that inspired you to study clouds and climate?

I remember being fascinated by clouds when I was young, but I never suspected that I would one day be working on these problems, trying to solve the puzzle of how clouds are actually formed. My background is in physics, not in atmospheric science. At the time when I left school and began working, it was almost impossible to get any permanent work whatsoever in science. That was why, after doing a lot of physics on short-term things at various places, I took a job at the Meteorological Society. And once I was there I thought, “Well, I had better start doing something.” So I started thinking about problems that were relevant in that field, and that was how I started thinking about the sun and how it might affect Earth.

It was a purely scientific impulse. With my background in theoretical physics, I had no—well, certainly not very much—knowledge about global warming. I simply thought that if there is a connection to the sun, that would be very interesting, and I certainly had no idea it would be viewed as so controversial.

In 1996, when you reported that changes in the sun’s activity could explain most or all of the recent rise in Earth’s temperature, the chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel called your announcement “extremely naive and irresponsible.” How did you react?

I was just stunned. I remember being shocked by how many thought what I was doing was terrible. I couldn’t understand it because when you are a physicist, you are trained that when you find something that cannot be explained, something that doesn’t fit, that is what you are excited about. If there is a possibility that you might have an explanation, that is something that everybody thinks is what you should pursue. Here was exactly the opposite reaction. It was as though people were saying to me, “This is something that you should not have done.” That was very strange for me, and it has been more or less like that ever since.

So it’s difficult to do climate research without being suspected of having a hidden agenda?

Yes, it is frustrating. People can use this however they want, and I can’t stop them. Some are accusing me of doing it for political reasons; some are saying I’m doing it for the oil companies. This is just ridiculous. I think there’s a huge interest in discrediting what I’m doing, but I’ve sort of gotten used to this. I’ve convinced myself the only thing I can do is just to continue doing good science. And I think time will show that we are on the right track.Do you ever worry that people will take your findings and use them to support unwarranted or even harmful conclusions?

I would be happy to kill the project if I could find out that there was something that didn’t fit or that I no longer believed in it. When we started, it was just a simple hypothesis based on a correlation, and correlations are, of course, something that could be quite dubious, and they could go away if you get better data. But this work has only strengthened itself over the years.

What first made you suspect that changes in the sun are having a significant impact on global warming?

I began my investigations by studying work done in 1991 by Eigil Fiin-Christensen and Knud Lassen Fiin-Christensen. They had looked at solar activity over the last 100 years and found a remarkable correlation to temperatures. I knew that many people dismissed that result, but I thought the correlation was so good that I could not help but start speculating—what could be the relation? Then I heard a suggestion that it might be cosmic rays, changing the chemistry high up in the atmosphere. I immediately thought, “Well, if that is going to work, it has to be through the clouds.”

That was the initial idea. Then I remembered seeing a science experiment at my high school in Elsinore, in which our teacher showed us what is called a cloud chamber, and seeing tracks of radioactive particles, which look like small droplets. So I thought to myself, “That would be the way to do it.” I started to obtain data from satellites, which actually was quite a detective work at that time, but I did start to find data, and to my surprise there seems to be a correlation between changes in cosmic rays and changes in clouds. And I think in early January 1996, I finally got a curve, which was very impressive with respect to the correlation. It was only over a short period of time, because the data were covering just seven years or something like that. So it was almost nothing, but it was a nice correlation.

How exactly does the mechanism work, linking changes in the sun with climate change on Earth?

The basic idea is that solar activity can turn the cloudiness up and down, which has an effect on the warming or cooling of Earth’s surface temperature. The key agents in this are cosmic rays, which are energetic particles coming from the interstellar media—they come from remnants of supernova explosions mainly. These energetic particles have to enter into what we call the heliosphere, which is the large volume of space that is dominated by our sun, through the solar wind, which is a plasma of electrons, atomic nuclei, and associated magnetic fields that are streaming nonstop from the sun. Cosmic-ray particles have to penetrate the sun’s magnetic field. And if the sun and the solar wind are very active—as they are right now—they will not allow so many cosmic rays to reach Earth. Fewer cosmic rays mean fewer clouds will be formed, and so there will be a warmer Earth. If the sun and the solar wind are not so active, then more cosmic rays can come in. That means more clouds [reflecting away more sunlight] and a cooler Earth.

Now it’s well known that solar activity can turn up and down the amount of cosmic rays that come to Earth. But the next question was a complete unknown: Why should cosmic rays affect clouds? Because at that time, when we began this work, there was no mechanism that could explain this. Meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation.

You and a half-dozen colleagues carried out a landmark study of cosmic rays and clouds while working in the basement of the Danish National Space Center. How did you do it?

We spent five or six years building an experiment here in Copenhagen, to see if we could find a connection. We named the experiment SKY, which means “cloud” in Danish. Natural cosmic rays came through the ceiling, and ultraviolet lamps played the part of the sun. We had a huge chamber, with about eight cubic meters of air, and the whole idea was to have air that is as clean as you have over the Pacific, and then of course, to be able to control what’s in the chamber. So we had minute trace gases as you have in the real atmosphere, of sulfur dioxide and ozone and water vapor, and then by keeping these things constant and just changing the ionization [the abundance of electrically charged atoms] in the chamber a little bit, we could see that we could produce these small aerosols, which are the basic building blocks for cloud condensation nuclei.

So the idea is that in the atmosphere, the ionization is helping produce cloud condensation nuclei, and that changes the amount and type of clouds. If you change the clouds, of course, you change the amount of energy that reaches Earth’s surface. So it’s a very effective way, with almost no energy input, to change the energy balance of Earth and therefore the temperature.

There, and we had to find new techniques in order to do them. Once we had the results, it was necessary to understand completely what was going on. So it was a very intense period of work, almost hypnotic.

Now there are other experiments, like the CLOUD project, also designed to investigate the effects of cosmic rays. How will this build on your work?

CLOUD is an international collaboration [sponsored by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN] that is taking place in Geneva, but it’s going to take a while before any results come out of that. It was approved last year, and building the machine will take at least three years. That’s a problem with science: You have to have a lot of patience because results are very slow to come.

If the scientists at CLOUD are able to prove that cosmic rays can change Earth’s cloud cover, would that force climate scientists to reevaluate their ideas about global warming?

Definitely, because in the standard view of climate change, you think of clouds as a result of the climate that you have. Our idea reverses that, turns things completely upside down, saying that the climate is a result of how the clouds are.

How do you see your work fitting into the grand debates about the causes of global warming and the considerations of what ought to be done about it?

I think—no, I believe—that the sun has had an influence in the past and is changing climate at the present, and it most certainly will do so in the future. We live in a unique time in history, because this period has the highest solar activity we have had in 1,000 years, and maybe even in 8,000 years. And we know that changes in solar activity have made significant changes in climate. For instance, we had the little ice age about 300 years ago. You had very few sunspots [markings on the face of the sun that indicate heightened solar activity] between 1650 and 1715, and for example, in Sweden in 1696, it caused the harvest to go wrong. People were starving—100,000 people died—and it was very desperate times, all coinciding with this very low solar activity. The last time we had high solar activity was during the medieval warming, which was when all of the cathedrals were built in Europe. And if you go 1,000 years back, you also had high solar activity, and that was when Rome was at its height. So I think there’s good evidence that these are significant changes that are happening naturally. If we are talking about the next century, there might be a human effect on climate change on top of that, but the natural effect from solar effect will be important. This should be recognized in the models and calculations that are being used to make predictions.

Why is there such resistance to doing that? Is the science that conflicted or confusing? Or is politics intervening?

I think it’s the latter, and I think it’s both. And I think there’s a fear that it will turn out, or that it would be suggested, that the man-made contribution is smaller than what you would expect if you look at CO2 alone.

Have you had a hard time getting funding?

For an eternity, I would say. But there are no oil companies funding my work, not at all. It sounds funny, but the Danish Carlsberg Foundation—you know, the one who makes beer—they have been of real support to me. They have a big foundation; in Denmark it’s one of the biggest resources for science. It’s because the founder of Carlsberg wanted to use scientific methods to make the best beer. It’s probably the best beer in the world, because of science.

If cosmic radiation is in fact the principal cause of global warming, is that good or bad news for human beings?

That’s a good question because you would have to say that we cannot predict the sun. And, of course, that would mean that we couldn’t do anything about it.

But if humans, through carbon dioxide emissions, are affecting climate less than we think, would that mean we may have more time to reduce the harmful effects?

Yes, that could of course be a consequence. But I don’t know how to get to such a conclusion because right now everything is set up that CO2 is a major disaster in society.

Do you agree that carbon dioxide is having at least some impact on Earth’s current warming?

Yes, but you have to give the sun a role. If you include the sun in the right way, the effect of CO2 must be smaller. The question is, how much smaller? All we know about the effect of CO2 is really based on climate models that predict how climate should be in 50 to 100 years, and these climate models cannot actually model clouds at all, so they are really poor. When you look at them, the models are off by many hundreds percent. It’s a well-known fact that clouds are the major uncertainty in any climate model. So the tools that we are using to make these predictions are not actually very good.

What do you hope to do next in pursuit of your theory?

I’m extremely excited about our next experiment, which will happen in the next couple months. We are planning to go one kilometer below Earth’s surface because when we do an experiment in the basement we cannot get rid of the radiation. Cosmic rays are so penetrating that there’s always ionization in our chamber and we cannot get to zero ionization. I think it will be the first time that people are attempting an experiment where there is no ionization present. I think it will be quite fascinating because it will tell us something about the details in the mechanism.

Do you think then that individuals and societies as a whole need to try to conserve energy? Do you use compact fluorescent lightbulbs, for instance?

Yes, yes, we use those. And I ride a bicycle. There are good reasons to conserve our resources and find a more economical way of using energy, but the argumentation is not linked necessarily to climate.

At this stage in your work, how confident are you that your basic theories are correct?

I think it is almost certain that cosmic rays are responsible for changes in climate. I think now I have very good evidence, and I think I’ve come up with some very good evidence that it is clouds. Of course, we cannot discuss the exact mechanism, but I think we have some very important fragments of these ideas. One extrapolation we could make, for instance: Would this mechanism work in an ancient atmosphere? Would these processes still happen? That is something I don’t know.

You discuss your work as part of an emerging field that you call “cosmoclimatology.” What is that?

It is the idea that processes in space and what is happening here on Earth are connected. It is this idea that when Earth is in a certain spiral arm of the Milky Way, you can associate that with a certain geological period. Previously, the idea was of Earth as a sort of isolated system on which processes evolved. Now all of a sudden it seems as if our position in the galaxy is important for what has happened and is happening here on Earth. It is this connection between Earth and space that’s exciting and why I have given it this name. Most of this research has taken place just within the last 10 years, and it is truly multidisciplinary, ranging from solar physics and atmospheric chemistry to geology and meteorology—even high-particle physicists are involved. The people who are doing space-related observations are very happy that there could be a connection from space to Earth because it makes a good argumentation for understanding processes out there.

These connections, which combine such a variety of disciplines and create opportunities for many lines of work, are surprising and wonderful. It has been a real challenge for me, though, because I have to look at so many different fields in order to work.

You’ve faced more than a few hard knocks in pursuing your scientific career. What keeps you going?

From the beginning, I have found this to be a really interesting problem, and now, I think, it is the potential of it that draws me on. It is something which started as a simple idea and seems to be continually extending, or expanding. That has really been the most important thing. I mean, for instance, I would never have thought that we would find these correlations between the cosmic rays and the evolution of the Milky Way and life on Earth. I never expected that all of these things are connected in a beautiful way.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/the-discover-interview-henrik-svensmark/

[guest49]

Not sure about some of his theory - As far as I am aware our sun has been in the same spiral arm since it first kicked into gear...  However, I agree, it has now been established beyond all doubt that climate change is driven by the sun.

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Meanwhile, at Franz Josef Glacier…





Some reading for flat-earthers/anti-warmalists:

• New Zealand's changing glaciers

• The science for climate change only feeds the denial: how do you beat that?  (ie…heads in the sand stupidity cannot be changed)

[reality]

...mmmm..looks like some prime real estate development potential there...do you have his phone number?

...good to see more land being made available for residential housing needs

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Only a total dumbarse........would be silly enough to want to build houses in a valley where regular flash floods roll huge boulders (both rocks and ice) bigger than houses down the valley, as often occurs in the Franz Josef Glacier valley!   

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

What the Earth will be like in 10,000 years, according to scientists

By CHRIST MOONEY | 11:49AM EST - Monday, February 08, 2016


An edge of the Thwaites Ice Shelf in West Antarctica. — Photograph: Jim Yungel/NASA.

A LARGE GROUP of climate scientists has made a bracing statement in the journal Nature Climate Change, arguing that we are mistaken if we think global warming is only a matter of the next 100 years or so — in fact, they say, we are locking in changes that will play out over as many as 10,000 years.

“The next few decades offer a brief window of opportunity to minimize large-scale and potentially catastrophic climate change that will extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far,” write the 22 climate researchers, led by Peter Clark, from Oregon State University.

The author names include not only a number of very influential climate scientists in general but several key leaders behind major reports from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including MIT's Susan Solomon and Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern in Switzerland.

The researchers' key contention is that we have been thinking about climate change far too narrowly by only projecting outward to the year 2100, which the research says “was originally driven by past computational capabilities.” Rather, we should consider that the long-term consequences of human emissions for global temperatures and sea level will play out over many millennia.

“It's a statement of worry,” said Raymond Pierrehumbert, a geoscientist at Oxford University and one of the study’s authors. “And actually, most of us who have worked both on paleoclimate and the future have been terrified by the idea of doubling or quadrupling CO² right from the get-go.”

“In hundreds of years from now, people will look back and say, ‘yeah, the sea level is rising, it will continue to rise, we live with a constant rise of sea level because of these people 200 years ago that used coal, and oil, and gas’,” said Anders Levermann, a sea-level-rise expert at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the paper's authors. “If you just look at this, it's stunning that we can make such a long-lasting impact that has the same magnitude as the ice ages.”

The key reason for this is that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a very long time before being slowly removed again by natural processes. “A considerable fraction of the carbon emitted to date and in the next 100 years will remain in the atmosphere for tens to hundreds of thousands of years,” the study noted. Meanwhile, the planet's sea levels adjust gradually to its rising temperature over thousands of years.

So what will the world look like in 10,000 years, thanks to us? That really depends on what we do in the next few hundred years with the fossil fuels to which we have relatively easy access. It also depends on whether or not we develop technologies that are capable of pulling carbon dioxide out of the air on a massive scale, comparable to the amount that we're currently emitting.

But assuming that we don't develop such technologies, here are the key factors to consider — as laid out in the new paper — about how we are shaping the planet's very distant future.

From 1750 to the present, human activities put about 580 billion metric tons, or gigatons, of carbon into the atmosphere — which converts into more than 2,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide (which has a larger molecular weight).

We're currently emitting about 10 gigatons of carbon per year — a number that is still expected to rise further in the future. The study therefore considers whether we will emit somewhere around another 700 gigatons in this century (which, with 70 years at 10 gigatons per year, could happen easily), reaching a total cumulative emissions of 1,280 gigatons — or whether we will go much further than that, reaching total cumulative levels as high as 5,120 gigatons. (It also considered scenarios in between.)

In 10,000 years, if we totally let it rip, the planet could ultimately be an astonishing 7 degrees Celsius warmer on average and feature seas 52 meters (170 feet) higher than they are now, the paper suggests. There would be almost no mountain glaciers left in temperate latitudes, Greenland would give up all of its ice and Antarctica would give up almost 45 meters worth of sea level rise, the study suggests.

Still, anyone observing the world's recent mobilization to address climate change in Paris in late 2015 would reasonably question whether humanity will indeed emit this much carbon. With the efforts now afoot to constrain emissions and develop clean energy worldwide, it stands to reason that we won't go so far.

“With Paris, it does get us off the exponential growth, and we might level off at 2,000, 3,000 gigatons,” says Pierrehumbert.

Still, what's striking is that when the paper outlines a much more modest 1,280-gigaton scenario — one that does not seem unreasonable, and that would only push the globe a little bit of the way beyond a rise of 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial temperature levels — the impacts over 10,000 years are still projected to be fairly dramatic.

In this scenario, we only lose 70 percent of glaciers outside of Greenland and Antarctica. Greenland gives up as much as four meters of sea level rise (out of a potential seven), while Antarctica could give up up to 24. Combined with thermal expansion of the oceans, this scenario could mean seas rise an estimated 25 meters (or 82 feet) higher in 10,000 years. There is, to be sure, “a big uncertainty range on that prediction,” Pierrehumbert said by email.

Once again, a key factor that could mitigate this dire forecast is the potential development of technologies that could remove carbon dioxide from the air and thus cool down the planet much faster than the Earth on its own can through natural processes. “If we want to have some backstop technology to avoid this, we really ought to be putting a lot more money into carbon dioxide removal,” Pierrehumbert said.

Pierrehumbert said he believes that we will manage to develop such a technology in coming centuries, so long as human societies remain wealthy enough — but he added that we don't know yet about how affordable it will be.

The new study fits into a growing body of scientific analysis suggesting that human alteration of the planet has truly brought on a new geological epoch, which has been dubbed the “anthropocene”. Taking a 10,000-year perspective certainly reinforces the geological scale of what's currently happening.

The ability to carry an analysis out so far into the future, Levermann said, is really the result in recent years of several key scientific developments. One is that “we are now in a better position to model the ice sheets, really,” he said.

At the same time, scientists have also recently begun to calculate so-called carbon budgets that describe how much we can emit and still hold the planet to a variety of temperature thresholds.

All of this coming together means that a conversation about increasingly long-range forecasts, and about the millennial scale consequences of today's greenhouse gas emissions, is growing within the scientific world. The question remains whether a similar conversation will finally take hold in the public and political one.

• Chris Mooney reports on science and the environment for The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • Scientists just uncovered yet another troubling fact about Antarctica's ice

 • This could be the biggest example yet of climate change shaping human history

 • Why so many economists back Obama's idea of a tax on oil

 • Why climate change is really, really unfair

 • It's not just Flint: Poor communities across the U.S. live with ‘extreme’ polluters

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/02/08/what-the-earth-will-be-like-in-10000-years-according-to-scientists

[guest49]

Would these be the same scientists that 40 years ago were prophesising 100foot sea rises by the year 2000?

At least they have learned one thing out of it - make sure all the people round when the prediction is made, are dead when the specified time rolls round

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

(click on the picture to read the news story)

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

Seas are now rising faster than they
have in 2,800 years, scientists say

By CHRIS MOONEY | 3:11PM EST - Monday, February 22, 2016


Waves driven by a cyclone appear in the Elbe estuary near the North Sea close to  northern Germany.
 — Photograph: Christian Charisius/European Pressphoto Agency.

A GROUP OF SCIENTISTS says it has now reconstructed the history of the planet’s sea levels arcing back over some 3,000 years — leading it to conclude that the rate of increase experienced in the 20th century was “extremely likely” to have been faster than during nearly the entire period.

“We can say with 95 percent probability that the 20th-century rise was faster than any of the previous 27 centuries,” said Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University who led the research with nine colleagues from several U.S. and global universities. Kopp said it's not that seas rose faster before that — they probably didn't — but merely that the ability to say as much with the same level confidence declines.

The study was published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Seas rose about 14 centimeters (5.5 inches) from 1900 to 2000, the new study suggests, for a rate of 1.4 millimeters per year. The current rate, according to NASA, is 3.4 millimeters per year, suggesting that sea level rise is still accelerating.

Unsurprisingly, the study blames the anomalous 20th-century rise on global warming — and not just that. It also calculates that, had humans not been warming the planet, there's very little chance that seas would have risen so much during the century, finding that instead of a 14 centimeter rise, we would have seen somewhere between a 3 centimeter fall and a 7 centimeter rise.

The new work is particularly significant because, in effect, the sea level analysis produces a so-called “hockey stick” graph — showing a long and relatively flat sea level “handle” for thousands of years, followed by a “blade” that turns sharply upwards in very recent times.

The discovery of such patterns itself has a long history, going back to a 1998 study by climate researcher Michael Mann of Penn State University and two colleagues — who found a “hockey stick” graph for the planet's temperature, rather than for its sea level. Since then the “hockey stick”, in its various incarnations, has come in for voluminous criticism from skeptics and doubters of human-caused climate change — even as multiple scientists have continued to affirm the conclusion that the last 100 years or so are way out of whack with what the planet has seen in the past thousand or more.

The new research also forecasts that no matter how much carbon dioxide we emit, 21st-century sea level rise will still greatly outstrip what was seen in the 1900s. Nonetheless, choices made today could have a big impact. For a low emissions scenario, it finds that seas might only rise between 24 and 61 centimeters. In contrast, for a high emissions scenario — one that the recent Paris climate accord pledged the world to avert — they could rise as much as 52 to 131 centimeters, or, at the very high end, 4.29 feet.

However, Kopp notes that the methods used to project these totals may not fully capture what happens over the course of this century. “We have a model that's calibrated against a period when a certain set of processes, largely thermal expansion and glaciers, were dominant,” he says, “and we're looking forward to a period when other factors will be dominant.”

As Kopp's words acknowledge, the major contributors to sea level rise in the 20th century were the melting of mountain glaciers around the globe and the natural expansion of ocean water as it warms. However, in the 21st century, researchers think that the truly major players in potential sea level rise, the huge ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, will come to play a larger role. (Just how large remains unclear.)

The current study was based on combining a variety of so-called “reconstructions” of past rates of sea level from 24 locations around the world with more recent measurements from 66 global tide gauges. That's necessary because you can't just measure sea level change in a single place and get a global picture — over long time periods, factors ranging from whether land is rising or sinking to changes in ocean currents and the gravitational pull of the planet's ice sheets mean that different regions can see different amounts of sea level rise (or fall).

One of the sites where past sea levels were reconstructed by scientists is pictured below:


Coastal wetland in Newfoundland, Canada, that harbors a record of sea level for the past 2,000 years. — Photograph: Ben Horton.

The new study follows in the footsteps of a 2011 study that looked at the ocean and climate records contained in salt marshes in North Carolina to infer the history of sea level rise over the past 2,100 years — research that had many of the same authors. That study, too, found that the recent sea level rise is unprecedented over that time period.

Mann of Penn State, one originator of the “hockey stick” reference and a co-author on the 2011 study (but not the current one), said by email that he thinks the current work is an “incremental advance” on that prior study, albeit one he agreed with in broad outline.

Mann continued by email:

The study nonetheless reiterates the conclusion we reached [in 2011] that the acceleration in sea level rise over the past century is unprecedented over at least the past millennium, and that this acceleration is directly related to the spike in surface temperature over the past century (i.e. the “hockey stick”).

The new paper emerges even as another study, also published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, produced very similar 21st-century projections of sea level rise. That paper, led by Matthias Mengel of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, also calculated that with unconstrained emissions, the Earth could see a maximum of some four feet of sea level rise by 2100. But it too acknowledged that the approach “cannot cover processes” like the possible collapse of the oceanfront glaciers of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which, it said, “is hypothesized to be already underway.”

Such calculations are roughly in line with the 2013 projections of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for expected sea level rise by 2100, although they rely on a different, more simple type of model than that body used. However, Princeton climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who was not involved in the current work but collaborates with Kopp and was his postdoctoral adviser, says that this agreement between approaches still “begs the question of just how much disintegration of the polar ice sheets will contribute to sea level during the 21st century since neither type of model is adequate for capturing this growing and potentially disastrous contribution — and that is ultimately the most important unknown, both with regard to sea level and potentially with respect to the whole field of climate change.”

Capping a major day for sea level rise news, Kopp also released a report on Monday along with Benjamin Strauss of Climate Central and two other researchers, using the current study's approach to determine that thousands of coastal “nuisance” floods in the United States over the 20th century would not have happened without human-caused global warming.

Based on just four inches of sea level rise attributed to humans in the 20th century, and another two inches so far in the 21st, Strauss said he “was really surprised to see that there are human fingerprints on thousands of coastal floods that we've already had in the United States.” The reason is that such nuisance floods — King Tide flooding in Miami would be a good example — represent what Strauss calls a “threshold” phenomenon, which is caused after sea level rise reaches a certain level.

“I think these studies really put the human fingerprint on Miami Beach's hundred-million-dollar saltwater flooding problem, and really a lot of what's going on in South Florida,” Strauss said.

• Chris Mooney reports on science and the environment for The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • We may have just seen a truly ominous new weather record

 • Why the U.S. East Coast could be a major ‘hotspot’ for rising seas

 • Why the planet's ancient past holds a worrying lesson about Antarctica

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/02/22/seas-are-now-rising-faster-than-they-have-in-2800-years-scientists-say

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

evolve grow some gills or die

[ssweetpea]

Evolving some protection against acid would be helpful as well.

As the CO₂ increases the oceans become more acidic - not much but enough to dissolve shells and coral.

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

The horrible no good very bad February weather everyone loved

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 4:21PM PST - Tuesday, March 01, 2016


LEFT: Ocean Beach, February 2016. So calm, so still, so warm, so lacking in normal amounts of ice-cold rain and wind, you can't help but dance at low tide.
RIGHT: Ocean Beach at sunset, February 2016. When even the iPhone’s meek little camera can make Ocean Beach look this warm and peaceful in February,
you know something is seriously amiss.

MAN, those long walks I took with my girl down at Ocean Beach a couple weeks ago? Right smack in the middle of San Francisco's normally dreary, rainy, bitterly refrigerated February? At sunset? Barefoot and laughing, gasping at the color of the sky and the balmy softness of the air and the grandly ridiculous, all-encompassing beauty? Astonishing.

And of course, very, very disturbing.

See, February is, historically, the wettest month around here, and the least friendly to any kind of outdoor excursion. Instead, for what amounted to nearly the entire month, San Francisco was sort of stupefyingly gorgeous. And romantic. And kind of perfect. And deeply unsettling.

It's not supposed to be like this, you see. It's supposed to be the way it's been for the past, oh, 10,000 years or so, since around the dawn of the geologic record, those broad, deep sets of planetary data that tell us that things like rainless Februaries, ice ages and major species explosions or die-offs usually happen over vast stretches of time, such as millennia and epochs.

In other words, nothing, really, to worry about. Sort of like an astronomer telling you that the sun is absolutely going to annihilate all life on Earth in a hot, unimaginably violent explosion. When? Oh, in about two billion years.

That was cute. That was then.


LEFT: Hot, and getting hotter. | RIGHT: February 2016 in San Francisco. Notice the complete lack of rainfall. And about 5-10 degrees above normal.

Things are different now. Geological time has accelerated, leapt forward, contracted into a seething fireball of We Are So Fṳcked. Remember when “moving at a glacial pace” meant “really, really slow?” Now it means “wholly goddamn terrifying.” Someone call the OED.

This February, in case I failed to mention it, was officially the hottest February ever recorded by man, worldwide. It handily “obliterated the all-time global temperature record set just last month,” sayeth Slate's in-house meteorologist Eric Holthaus over in his always-exceptional climate column. “Global warming is going into overdrive,” he added, going on to list out all manner of insane weather data that makes you cringe and feel exasperatingly helpless and pour more bourbon.

(Query: What's the causal relationship matrix between bleak climate change news and overall alcohol consumption? Someone should investigate. #climatechangecocktails)

In other words, it's not just San Francisco. Everywhere on earth, temperatures and weather patterns are doing really horrible, unseemly things to the common definition of “normal”, to the degree that scientists, animals and plant life alike are all caught in a perpetual, deeply anxious state of WTF.

“The old assumptions about what was normal are being tossed out the window … The old normal is gone,” Holthaus quotes the Pacific Institute's Peter Gleick, another noted climate scientist, as sighing heavily into his coffee.


More blood red than cool blue, all year long. Not a good thing.

I know what you're thinking: It's tougher than ever to read these articles, to scan through all the distressing data — barely a hint of which bodes well for humanity as a whole — to notice the fire-red charts, the downward-pointing arrows, the horrible rainfall totals, the insane snow-melt speeds, the starving polar bears, the sea life decimations and the imminent extinction of that one class of insect we need more than any other: the pollinators, and still know how to respond with anything other than abject fatalism.

All we can point to are hints that global CO² emissions might be leveling off for the first time in decades (though overall concentrations are higher, and more dangerous, than ever before). All we have is this odd notion that, while humans are lousy at 10,000 things, we're shockingly good at adapting, at making do, at scrambling for survival by inventing technologies that, if not capable of completely solving the most urgent problems (too late for that), they can at least maybe stave off the inevitable for another handful of years.

And isn't that about all we can ask for, really? Isn't that essentially what we’ve been doing since we arrived, grunting and dumb and hairy, on this pale blue dot in the first place? What else have we done except invent all manner of ingenious, self-aggrandizing tools — war, God, chainsaws, the internal combustion engine, Bluetooth frying pans, $7 coffee drinks — to whistle past the planet's graveyard and postpone our own increasingly self-imposed annihilation?

We've always been blissfully, unequivocally doomed. We've just become more skillful at ignoring it.

• Email: Mark Morford

• Mark Morford on Twitter and Facebook.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2016/03/01/the-horrible-no-good-very-bad-february-everyone-loved

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

New iPads are here! If you live long enough, that is.

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 2:36PM PDT - Monday, March 21, 2016


Technology! Expertly designed to deflect the sad, sickening feeling that we're not long for this world, thanks in no small part to our technology.

I ADORE JUXTAPOSITION. I love it when, thanks to the cataleptic cruelties of the Interwebs, you can now read all manner of surreal, inspiring, devastating and/or intellectually insulting headline all at once, all screaming for your attention and all piled atop one another like a pack of feral dogs fighting over a (supremely jaded) bone.

Examples? Everywhere. Such as:

Much flurry in techtopia over the announcement of a new iPad, and a new iPhone model from Apple — news which, in my feed anyway, slammed right up against a fine, inspiring tale about how CO² emissions haven't been this high since the last dinosaur extinction — that's about 66 million years, give or take, when an asteroid crashed into the planet and blotted out the sun for awhile — and lo, what hell we humans hath wrought to have hit that ignoble mark.


China! So much fun, you almost forget we're wiping ourselves out.

Boom. Simultaneously fascinating and jarring, that narrative interplay, that wild n' heartbreaking juxtaposition of elements. Don't you think?

It's straightforward enough: It says that our extraordinary technologies continue on apace, offering magnificent amounts of everyday magic and unprecedented connectivity, even as the planet appears to be racing in the exact opposite direction, offering increasing amounts of dissolution and cataclysm, and thereby instantly negating, on a massive scale, everything our shiny tech is so desperately trying to pretend isn’t really happening.

Deny the correlation, the direct and undeniable cause/effect at your peril. The truth is unstoppable: The harder and more ruthlessly we keep pushing in one direction, the more violently the planet keeps recoiling in the other.



Of course, this isn't just about Apple, per se. It could have been nearly any story of a similar ilk, from tech to global profiteering to Trump's sickening rise; they all underscore exactly how our mad lust for progress, profit and ideological megalomania keeps slamming against the moral and environmental cost we're paying for it all — which is, essentially, ourselves.

It all dovetails fabulously with the recent news that science, that bastion of lies and liberal conspiracy, is now suggesting that the planet has transformed and upheaved so much during humanity's short stay, we've actually ushered in an entirely new geologic epoch.

It's true. Geoscientists now say that we've “decisively” exited the Holocene era, a roughly 12,000-year epoch that was defined by a very slow, natural warming period (a response to the previous cooling epoch), and are currently aswim in the roiling, people-fueled magma of the so-called Anthropocene — AKA, the Age of Humans. AKA the age of OMG WTF Have We Done?


iPads! Because iPads!

It's flattering only in the worst possible way. It means humankind has altered the planet's core conditions and ecosystems, at a deep structural level, quite likely irreversibly, and quite likely forever.

It means there is no longer any doubt — just look at the polar ice cores and deep ocean sediments, they say — that our feral obsessions with technology, population growth and unchecked resource abuse have had unimaginable, largely deleterious effects on our home planet. Is there still a case to be made for optimism when it comes to climate change? Sure there is.

But the overall point is undeniable: Mother Nature is no longer in charge of earth's overall trajectory. She's now merely bashing against and reacting to our overwhelming abuse of her — and her reactions are, shall we say, not at all pleased.

Don't believe it? That’s OK. There's an iPad app for that.


Light her up, and destroy her quickly. NASA image acquired April 18th to October 23rd, 2012, mainly to blow. Your. Little. Mind.


Mmm, traffic. It's like rat poison for the soul.

• Email: Mark Morford

• Mark Morford on Twitter and Facebook.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2016/03/21/new-ipads-are-here-if-you-live-long-enough