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

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Im2Sexy4MyPants
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« Reply #175 on: January 22, 2010, 03:10:52 pm »

They must be global cooling skeptics
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And the many things that will personally effect you.
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AND WAKE THE F_ _K UP
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« Reply #176 on: February 27, 2010, 12:51:43 pm »


Bill McKibben — Climate Change's O.J. Simpson Moment

posted February 25, 2010 | TomDispatch.com

“In early 2009,” writes Bill McKibben in a soon-to-be-published new book, “just as Obama was getting set to unveil his energy plans, word came that 2,340 lobbyists had registered to work on climate change on Capitol Hill (that’s about six per congressman), 85 percent of them devoted to slowing down progress.” By early 2010, you can see the results of such efforts, multiplied many times over by the staggering levels of support available for anti-climate-change work from the richest industry on the planet: the energy business. All this was not helped, of course, by the much hyped “climate-gate” which proved that climate-change scientists were fallible human beings and not simply extraterrestrial super-brains. These “scandals” were, in turn, blown up to proportions that seemed to blot out the very image of the disappearing Arctic icepack.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the latest poll on the American public’s attitude toward climate change shows startling drops in the belief in the very existence of climate change, in humanity's role in causing it, and in its import for the planet: a 14-point drop since October 2008 in Americans who believe climate change is happening at all (to 57%), a 10-point drop in those who believe that human activity is at the root of the problem (to 47%), and a 13-point drop in those who claim to be “somewhat” or “very” worried about the problem (to 50%).

What’s strangest in all this is that the evidence for our changing planet seems to stare us in the face — from the previously mythical, now navigable Northwest Passage to melting glaciers just about everywhere to more intense storms (including, of course, more intense snowstorms because, despite the name “global warming,” no one has yet banished winter from the planet). What makes this sadder yet is that, if the U.S. refuses to deal with our planet’s health and well-being (and ours), everything becomes so much harder, so much less likely. If you want to put all of this into some reasonable perspective, when you’ve finished Bill McKibben’s latest piece, think about ordering his new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (to be published this April). The title is unsettling — especially for an editor, with those two “a”s in Eaarth — and the book more so, but it’s not without hope and it could be the necessary guide to, and text for, the new planet with ever quirkier weather on which, after so many thousands of years, we humans suddenly find ourselves. It’s as if we’ve landed on Pandora without any of the charm. (By the way, don’t miss the latest TomCast, the site’s accompanying audio interview with Bill McKibben on what to make of climate-science scandals.)


— Tom Engelhardt



The Attack on Climate-Change Science

Why It’s the O.J. Moment of the Twenty-First Century

By Bill McKibben

Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from the Wall Street Journal. It was a mixed and judicious appraisal. “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.” And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”

I doubt that’s what the Journal will say about my next book when it comes out in a few weeks, and I know that no GOP presidential contender would now dream of acknowledging that human beings are warming the planet. Sarah Palin is currently calling climate science “snake oil” and last week, the Utah legislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning "a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome" on a nearly party-line vote.

And here’s what’s odd. In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin. If my reporting made me think it was nonetheless convincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to agree.

Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. (You might not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstrated just how easy it was to rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the two decades that have passed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth’s major natural systems have all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.

Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet. At least partly as a result, Congress feels little need to consider global-warming legislation, no less pass it; and as a result of that failure, progress towards any kind of international agreement on climate change has essentially ground to a halt.

Climate-Change Denial as an O.J. Moment

The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?

The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: it was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.

If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.

Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t happen by 2035, as the report indicated — a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet that it’s more or less obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: virtually every glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting.

Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called “Climate-gate” scandal from an English research center last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complying with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough and maybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence about climate change that the world’s scientific researchers have, in fact, compiled. Indeed, you can make almost exactly the same kind of fuss Johnnie Cochran made — that’s what Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) did, insisting the emails proved “scientific fascism,” and the climate skeptic Christopher Monckton called his opponents “Hitler youth.” Such language filters down. I’m now used to a daily diet of angry email, often with subject lines like the one that arrived yesterday: “Nazi Moron Scumbag.”

If you’re smart, you can also take advantage of lucky breaks that cross your path. Say a record set of snowstorms hit Washington D.C. It won’t even matter that such a record is just the kind of thing scientists have been predicting, given the extra water vapor global warming is adding to the atmosphere. It’s enough that it’s super-snowy in what everyone swore was a warming world.

For a gifted political operative like, say, Marc Morano, who runs the Climate Depot website, the massive snowfalls this winter became the grist for a hundred posts poking fun at the very idea that anyone could still possibly believe in, you know, physics. Morano, who really is good, posted a link to a live webcam so readers could watch snow coming down; his former boss, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), had his grandchildren build an igloo on the Capitol grounds, with a sign that read: "Al Gore’s New Home." These are the things that stick in people’s heads. If the winter glove won’t fit, you must acquit.

Why We Don’t Want to Believe in Climate Change

The climate deniers come with a few built-in advantages. Thanks to Exxon Mobil and others with a vested interest in debunking climate-change research, their “think tanks” have plenty of money, none of which gets wasted doing actual research to disprove climate change. It’s also useful for a movement to have its own TV network, Fox, though even more crucial to the denial movement are a few rightwing British tabloids which validate each new “scandal” and put it into media play.

That these guys are geniuses at working the media was proved this February when even the New York Times ran a front page story, “Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel”, which recycled most of the accusations of the past few months. What made it such a glorious testament to their success was the chief source cited by the Times: one Christopher Monckton, or Lord Monckton as he prefers to be called since he is some kind of British viscount. He is also identified as a “former advisor to Margaret Thatcher,” and he did write a piece for the American Spectator during her term as prime minister offering his prescriptions for “the only way to stop AIDS”:

“...screen the entire population regularly and… quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month... all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.”

He speaks with equal gusto and good sense on matters climatic — and now from above the fold in the paper of record.

Access to money and the media is not the only, or even the main reason, for the success of the climate deniers, though. They’re not actually spending all that much cash and they’ve got legions of eager volunteers doing much of the internet lobbying entirely for free. Their success can be credited significantly to the way they tap into the main currents of our politics of the moment with far more savvy and power than most environmentalists can muster. They’ve understood the popular rage at elites. They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control.

Some of that is, of course, purely partisan. The columnist David Brooks, for instance, recently said: “On the one hand, I totally accept the scientific authorities who say that global warming is real and it is manmade. On the other hand, I feel a frisson of pleasure when I come across evidence that contradicts the models… [in part] because I relish any fact that might make Al Gore look silly.” But the passion with which people attack Gore more often seems focused on the charge that he’s making large sums of money from green investments, and that the whole idea is little more than a scam designed to enrich everyone involved. This may be wrong — Gore has testified under oath that he donates his green profits to the cause — and scientists are not getting rich researching climate change (constant blog comments to the contrary), but it resonates with lots of people. I get many emails a day on the same theme: “The game is up. We’re on to you.”

When I say it resonates with lots of people, I mean lots of people. O.J.’s lawyers had to convince a jury made up mostly of black women from central city L.A., five of whom reported that they or their families had had “negative experiences” with the police. For them, it was a reasonably easy sell. When it comes to global warming, we’re pretty much all easy sells because we live the life that produces the carbon dioxide that’s at the heart of the crisis, and because we like that life.

Very few people really want to change in any meaningful way, and given half a chance to think they don’t need to, they’ll take it. Especially when it sounds expensive, and especially when the economy stinks. Here’s David Harsanyi, a columnist for the Denver Post: “If they’re going to ask a nation — a world — to fundamentally alter its economy and ask citizens to alter their lifestyles, the believers’ credibility and evidence had better be unassailable.”

“Unassailable” sets the bar impossibly high when there is a dedicated corps of assailants out there hard at work. It is true that those of us who want to see some national and international effort to fight global warming need to keep making the case that the science is strong. That’s starting to happen. There are new websites and iPhone apps to provide clear and powerful answers to the skeptic trash-talking, and strangely enough, the denier effort may, in some ways, be making the case itself: if you go over the multi-volume IPCC report with a fine tooth comb and come up with three or four lousy citations, that’s pretty strong testimony to its essential accuracy.

Clearly, however, the antiseptic attempt to hide behind the magisterium of Science in an effort to avoid the rough-and-tumble of Politics is a mistake. It’s a mistake because science can be — and, in fact, should be — infinitely argued about. Science is, in fact, nothing but an ongoing argument, which is one reason why it sounds so disingenuous to most people when someone insists that the science is “settled.” That’s especially true of people who have been told at various times in their lives that some food is good for you, only to be told later that it might increase your likelihood of dying.

Why Data Isn’t Enough

I work at Middlebury College, a topflight liberal arts school, so I’m surrounded by people who argue constantly. It’s fun.  One of the better skeptical takes on global warming that I know about is a weekly radio broadcast on our campus radio station run by a pair of undergraduates. They’re skeptics, but not cynics. Anyone who works seriously on the science soon realizes that we know more than enough to start taking action, but less than we someday will. There will always be controversy over exactly what we can now say with any certainty. That’s life on the cutting edge. I certainly don’t turn my back on the research—we’ve spent the last two years at 350.org building what Foreign Policy called “the largest ever coordinated global rally” around a previously obscure data point, the amount of atmospheric carbon that scientists say is safe, measured in parts per million.

But it’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.

So let’s figure out how to talk about it. Let’s look at Exxon Mobil, which each of the last three years has made more money than any company in the history of money. Its business model involves using the atmosphere as an open sewer for the carbon dioxide that is the inevitable byproduct of the fossil fuel it sells. And yet we let it do this for free. It doesn't pay a red cent for potentially wrecking our world.

Right now, there’s a bill in the Congress — cap-and-dividend, it’s called — that would charge Exxon for that right, and send a check to everyone in the country every month. Yes, the company would pass on the charge at the pump, but 80% of Americans (all except the top-income energy hogs) would still make money off the deal. That represents good science, because it starts to send a signal that we should park that SUV, but it’s also good politics.

By the way, if you think there’s a scam underway, you’re right — and to figure it out just track the money going in campaign contributions to the politicians doing the bidding of the energy companies. Inhofe, the igloo guy? Over a million dollars from energy and utility companies and executives in the last two election cycles. You think Al Gore is going to make money from green energy? Check out what you get for running an oil company.

Worried that someone is going to wreck your future? You’re right about that, too. Right now, China is gearing up to dominate the green energy market. They’re making the investments that mean future windmills and solar panels, even ones installed in this country, will be likely to arrive from factories in Chenzhou, not Chicago.

Coal companies have already eliminated most good mining jobs, simply by automating them in the search for ever higher profits. Now, they’re using their political power to make sure that miner’s kids won’t get to build wind turbines instead. Everyone should be mighty pissed — just not at climate-change scientists.

But keep in mind as well that fear and rage aren’t the only feelings around. They’re powerful feelings, to be sure, but they’re not all we feel. And they are not us at our best.

There’s also love, a force that has often helped motivate large-scale change, and one that cynics in particular have little power to rouse. Love for poor people around the world, for instance. If you think it’s not real, you haven’t been to church recently, especially evangelical churches across the country. People who take the Gospel seriously also take seriously indeed the injunction to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless.

It’s becoming patently obvious that nothing challenges that goal quite like the rising seas and spreading deserts of climate change. That’s why religious environmentalism is one of the most effective emerging parts of the global warming movement; that’s why we were able to get thousands of churches ringing their bells 350 times last October to signify what scientists say is the safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere; that’s why Bartholomew, patriarch of the Orthodox church and leader of 400 million eastern Christians, said, “Global warming is a sin and 350 is an act of redemption.”

There’s also the deep love for creation, for the natural world. We were born to be in contact with the world around us and, though much of modernity is designed to insulate us from nature, it doesn’t really work. Any time the natural world breaks through — a sunset, an hour in the garden — we’re suddenly vulnerable to the realization that we care about things beyond ourselves. That’s why, for instance, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are so important: get someone out in the woods at an impressionable age and you’ve accomplished something powerful. That’s why art and music need to be part of the story, right alongside bar graphs and pie charts. When we campaign about climate change at 350.org, we make sure to do it in the most beautiful places we know, the iconic spots that conjure up people’s connection to their history, their identity, their hope.

The great irony is that the climate skeptics have prospered by insisting that their opponents are radicals. In fact, those who work to prevent global warming are deeply conservative, insistent that we should leave the world in something like the shape we found it. We want our kids to know the world we knew. Here’s the definition of radical: doubling the carbon content of the atmosphere because you’re not completely convinced it will be a disaster. We want to remove every possible doubt before we convict in the courtroom, because an innocent man in a jail cell is a scandal, but outside of it we should act more conservatively.

In the long run, the climate deniers will lose; they’ll be a footnote to history. (Hey, even O.J. is finally in jail.) But they’ll lose because we’ll all lose, because by delaying action, they will have helped prevent us from taking the steps we need to take while there’s still time. If we’re going to make real change while it matters, it’s important to remember that their skepticism isn’t the root of the problem. It simply plays on our deep-seated resistance to change. That’s what gives the climate cynics ground to operate. That’s what we need to overcome, and at bottom that’s a battle as much about courage and hope as about data.


______________________________________

• Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books, including the forthcoming Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Times Books, April 2010). He’s a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. Catch the latest TomCast, TomDispatch.com’s audio interview with Bill McKibben on what to make of the climate-science scandals.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175211/tomgram%3A_bill_mckibben%2C_climate_change%27s_o.j._simpson_moment
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« Reply #177 on: February 27, 2010, 04:36:01 pm »

 Socialists always use bogus scams to take more control of peoples lives
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« Reply #178 on: July 14, 2011, 09:32:41 pm »


Climate change and extreme weather link cannot be ignored

By KIRAN CHUG - The Dominion Post | 3:05PM - Thursday, 14 July 2011

EXTREME WEATHER: Scientists say more events like the tornado that caused this destruction in Waikanae will occur as a result of climate change. — ANDREW GORRIE/The Dominion Post.
EXTREME WEATHER: Scientists say more events like the tornado
that caused this destruction in Waikanae will occur as a result
of climate change. — ANDREW GORRIE/The Dominion Post.


HUMAN-INDUCED climate change will see more disastrous storms, heatwaves and floods afflict the globe.

Scientists have drawn the strongest link yet between climate change and extreme weather events, and say the connection can no longer be ignored.

  • Related story: Seven biggest storms to hit Wellington

New Zealander Kevin Trenberth,  scientist who is the head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, based in Colorado, said events of the past year and a half had been extraordinary.

"It's as clear a warning as we're going to get about prospects for the future."

Dr Trenberth said the world could expect more droughts, floods, intense storms, hurricanes and tornadoes.

More heat waves would bring consequences such as wild fires in their wake.

Although the scientific community had not reached a consensus yet on whether climate change was to blame, he said more work was being done in the area and it took scientists time to get to such a point.

Since the 1970s, water vapour in the atmosphere had increased by about four per cent, and he said the world was now noticing that "when it rains, it pours."

Professor Martin Manning of Victoria University's Climate Change Research Institute said countries were now looking at ways to prepare for the risks they faced, and the insurance industry in particular was taking notice.


http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/5285118/Climate-change-and-extreme-weather-link-cannot-be-ignored



While the “anti-warmalists” and “climate-change deniers” fiddle, Rome burns!
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« Reply #179 on: June 27, 2012, 01:54:45 pm »


From the Los Angeles Times....

California sea levels to rise 5-plus feet this century, study says

As climate change expands the oceans, sea levels will rise more than average along
the California coast because much of the state is sinking, according to a new report.


By TONY BARBOZA | 10:30PM - Sunday, June 24, 2012

The destructive power of rising sea levels will be felt first when storms hit vulnerable places such as Newport Beach, said Gary Griggs, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. Above, the Wedge at Newport Beach. — Photo: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times/September 01, 2011.
The destructive power of rising sea levels will be felt first when storms hit vulnerable places such
as Newport Beach, said Gary Griggs, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.
Above, the Wedge at Newport Beach. — Photo: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times/September 01, 2011.


SEA LEVELS Sea levels along the California coast are expected to rise up to 1 foot in 20 years, 2 feet by 2050 and as much as 5½ feet by the end of the century, climbing slightly more than the global average and increasing the risk of flooding and storm damage, a new study says.

That's because much of California is sinking, extending the reach of a sea that is warming and expanding because of climate change, according to a report by a committee of scientists released Friday by the National Research Council.

In Washington and Oregon, where geological processes are flexing the land upward, researchers predict a less dramatic sea level rise that will register below the global average.

The report, commissioned by California, Oregon, Washington and several federal agencies, is the closest look yet at how global warming — which causes ocean water to expand and ice to melt — will raise sea levels along the West Coast.

Tide gauges show that the world's oceans have risen about 7 inches in the last century, and that rate is accelerating, the report notes.

"Sea level rise isn't a political question, it's a scientific reality," said Gary Griggs, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz and a member of the committee that produced the report.

Globally, the study predicts up to 9 inches of sea level rise by 2030, 1½ feet by 2050 and 4½ feet by 2100.

The projections are largely in line with other recent scientific estimates but substantially higher than the 2007 figures by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change because they factor in a greater contribution from melting ice.

The study was drafted by a committee of scientists formed as a result of a 2008 executive order by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, which directed state agencies to plan for the effects of sea level rise. The government agencies sponsored the study will use it to prepare for coastal erosion and flooding that is expected to threaten homes, businesses, roads, airports and other structures located within a few feet of the high-tide line.

The California Natural Resources Agency said in a statement that the report "confirms the need to take action to address the impacts of rising sea level."

The study shows how unevenly the sea will rise from place to place because of regional factors such as the movement of tectonic plates, climate patterns such as El Niño and the effects of melting glaciers and ice sheets in Alaska, Greenland and Antarctica.

For instance, although tide gauges in California show sea levels rising over the last century, levels have been falling north of Cape Mendocino as geological activity pushes up the land. A major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, such as a magnitude 8, could upend that trend, causing parts of the coast to sink and suddenly raising sea levels by 3 feet or more, the report says.

The report is the latest to warn that the rising sea will place coastal communities at increasing risk, with most of the damage caused by a combination of big waves, storm surges and high tides. The warm ocean conditions of a strong El Niño can magnify those effects, the report says, expanding sea water and raising sea levels by about a foot for several months.

Coastal California could see serious damage from storms within a few decades, especially in low-lying areas of Southern California and the Bay Area. San Francisco International Airport, for instance, could flood if the sea rises a little more than a foot, a mark expected to be reached in the next few decades. Erosion could cause coastal cliffs to retreat more than 100 feet by 2100, according to the report.

For an idea of what's in store, the report says, look at what happened in the winter of 1983. That's when a series of potent El Niño-driven storms hit California's coast, causing more than $200 million in damage from flooding, high waves and erosion. More than 3,000 homes and businesses were damaged and 33 oceanfront homes destroyed.

Although the rise in sea levels will happen gradually, Griggs said, its destructive power will be felt first when storms hit vulnerable places such as Newport Beach and the San Francisco Bay.

"In the short term it's these severe storms in low-lying areas that are most problematic," Griggs said. "So we have to plan for that."


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-adv-sea-level-20120625,0,7840116.story



From the Los Angeles Times....

Hey, California, hot enough for ya? Just wait!

By PAUL WHITEFIELD | 1:58PM - Monday, June 25, 2012

WITH APOLOGIES to Bob Dylan, do we need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows?

Certainly it seems they don’t in North Carolina. There, lawmakers are considering a bill that would essentially deny global warming and accompanying predictions of rising sea levels. All so developers can continue to make a buck off people who assume that if you build it, it must be safe — even if it isn’t.

In California, we’re also facing the threat of rising sea levels.

As The Times reported Friday:

Sea levels along the California coast are expected to rise as much as 1 foot in 20 years, 2 feet by 2050 and as much as 5½ feet by the end of the century, climbing slightly faster than the global average and increasing the risk of flooding and storm damage, a new study says.

And it’s not just melting ice that’s working against us. Turns out the old saw about California sliding into the ocean is more accurate than you might’ve thought:

Much of California is slowly sinking, extending the reach of a sea that is getting hotter and expanding due to global warming, according to a report by a committee of scientists released Friday by the National Research Council.

But wait, there's more! It seems that the Golden State is going to get goldener, as in burnt-toast gold:

“By the middle of the century, the number of days with temperatures above 95 degrees each year will triple in downtown Los Angeles, quadruple in portions of the San Fernando Valley and even jump five-fold in a portion of the High Desert in L.A. County,” according to a new UCLA climate change study.

Of course, I like to find silver linings in bad news. So here it is:  We’ll be hot, but if we want to go to the beach to cool off, the ocean won’t be as far away.

Still, it’s interesting to contrast the political reaction in L.A. to the climate news with that of the folks in North Carolina:

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said the forecasts provide the groundwork for local governments, utilities, hospitals and other institutions to prepare for the hot spells to come. Villaraigosa said the region may have to strengthen building codes to reduce risk to residents. "That could mean replacing incentives with building codes requiring 'green' and 'cool' roofs, cool pavements, tree canopies and parks," he said.

Which, I suspect, is going to be much more expensive than following North Carolina’s example and simply ordering the Earth to stand still. Silly liberals!

Of course, the folks in North Carolina may yet have to deal with reality. The state's proposed law wants only past data to be used in assessing the future threat of rising seas. But on Monday, a report was released that has sobering data, from the past, about the East Coast's future, North Carolina's in particular:

Sea levels in a 620-mile "hot spot" along the Atlantic coast are rising three to four times faster than the global average, according to a new study by theU.S. Geological Survey.

The sharp rise in sea levels from North Carolina to Massachusetts could mean serious flooding and storm damage for major cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Boston, as well as threats to wetlands habitats, the study said.

Since 1990, sea levels have risen 2 millimeters to 3.7 millimeters a year from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, on the Outer Banks, to Boston, said the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The global average for the same two-decade period was 0.6 millimeters to 1 millimeters per year.


Seems fairly conclusive to me. But I don't expect that this report will change the minds of ardent climate change deniers.

So for them, I propose a simple test:

Fill a glass of water nearly to the top.  Put some ice cubes in it. Let the ice cubes melt.

Observe what happens.

And then, perhaps, think again about whether it’s really a good idea to continue to build at the ocean’s edge. Even in North Carolina.

Oh, and if you live in California, keep that ice water handy.  You're going to need it.


http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-climate-change-california-north-carolina-bad-news-20120625,0,7779214.story
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« Reply #180 on: June 27, 2012, 02:34:54 pm »

I get a sense of deja vu here.  Sea levels were supposed to rise astronomically in the 1980's.  They didn't, but were confidently predicted to rise in the 1990's - they didn't, but were inevitably going to rise in the 2000's - surprise, they didn't.  

Its about time the warmalists took their agenda and fucked off, somewhere far away.
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« Reply #181 on: June 27, 2012, 02:48:22 pm »

But Yak, if you don't believe in it you're a neanderthal. On the other hand, if you believe in the sky daddy (another unsupported theory) then you are a religious fuckwit.
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« Reply #182 on: June 28, 2012, 08:45:07 am »

No, in North Carolina they've based a bill based on not using whacky models, but on actual observation.

California has not experienced any special sea level rise, but they're basing their stupidity on computer models that have been shown to be extremely flawed. For example they've realised that twenty years of models have been completely wrong in Antarctica and doesn't reflect the reality down there at all.

Let's not forget James Hansen's scenarios from 1988, where we've followed scenario A in GHG usage, but under scenario C in temperature increases; scenario C was if we gave up everything and lived in the Garden of Eden Green Utopia.

(Computer models work fine when the parameters are known, otherwise they're a case of garbage in, garbage out)
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« Reply #183 on: June 28, 2012, 10:30:15 pm »


From the Los Angeles Times....

USGS: Sea level in Atlantic ‘hot spot’ rising faster than world's

By DAVID ZUCCHINO | 11:25AM - Monday, June 25, 2012

A flooded road on Hatteras Island, North Carolina, after Hurricane Irene swept through the area. — Photo: Jim R. Bounds/Associated Press/August 28, 2011.
A flooded road on Hatteras Island, North Carolina, after Hurricane Irene swept through the area.
 — Photo: Jim R. Bounds/Associated Press/August 28, 2011.


SEA LEVELS in a 620-mile “hot spot” along the Atlantic coast are rising three to four times faster than the global average, according to a new study by theU.S. Geological Survey.

The sharp rise in sea levels from North Carolina to Massachusetts could mean serious flooding and storm damage for major cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Boston, as well as threats to wetlands habitats, the study said.

Since 1990, sea levels have risen 2 millimeters to 3.7 millimeters a year from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, on the Outer Banks, to Boston, said the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The global average for the same two-decade period was 0.6 millimeters to 1 millimeters per year.

Experts at the Geological Survey, along with other scientists, say that climate change and other factors will likely produce an average global sea level rise of two to three feet by 2100, said Asbury Sallenger, a USGS oceanographer who led the study, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. The study predicts that sea levels will rise an additional 8 inches to 11 inches in the Atlantic coast “hot spot”, he said.

The main cause of recent sea level increases along the coast is the slowing of Atlantic currents caused by the arrival of fresh water from the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the study said.

“Cities in the hot spot, like Norfolk, New York and Boston, already experience damaging floods during relatively low-intensity storms,” Sallenger said.  Accelerated sea level rise in the hot spot will raise the risk of flooding and the height of storm surges, he said.

The USGS report follows a study by the National Research Council predicting that sea levels along the California coast will rise as much as one foot in just 20 years, two feet by 2050 and five-and-a-half feet by 2100.  The report, released Friday, says the increases are caused by climate change and by the sinking of land masses in much of California.

The study predicts that global sea levels will rise 9 inches by 2030, 18 inches by 2050, and four-and-a-half feet by 2100.

Sea level rise is a sensitive subject for some political conservatives, who say that global warming is a hoax and that sea levels are not in danger of rising precipitously. The USGS study is significant because it provides data showing that sea levels have risen over the past two decades along the Atlantic Coast, regardless of the cause.

This spring, Republicans in the North Carolina legislature introduced a bill that would require sea level rise forecasts to be based on past patterns and would all but outlaw projections based on climate change data.

Using climate change and other data, a science panel with the state Coastal Resources Commission said that sea levels along the North Carolina coast could rise an average of 39 inches by 2100.  Coastal business and development interests complained to the Republican-controlled legislature, saying the projections could trigger regulations costing businesses and homeowners millions of dollars.

Sallenger called the North Carolina science panel’s 39-inch prediction “totally sensible”.


http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-sea-level-atlantic-20120625,0,5813153.story
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« Reply #184 on: June 28, 2012, 10:30:34 pm »


From the Los Angeles Times....

Mass evacuations ordered as wildfires rage in Colorado

32,000 people flee homes in the Colorado Springs area, including
parts of the Air Force Academy, and Boulder is under threat.


By JENNY DEAM and JOHN M. GLIONNA | 6:41PM - Wednesday, June 27, 2012

The Waldo Canyon fire roars through a neighboord in the foothills near Colorado Springs, Colorado. — Photo: Helen H. Richardson/Denver Post/June 26, 2012.
The Waldo Canyon fire roars through a neighboord in the foothills near Colorado Springs, Colorado.
 — Photo: Helen H. Richardson/Denver Post/June 26, 2012.


COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado — Marking the worst fire season in Colorado history, three major blazes are burning uncontrolled in the Rocky Mountain state, destroying hundreds of homes, prompting mass evacuations in Colorado Springs and threatening the city of Boulder 100 miles away.

For weeks, Colorado has been in a state of siege as the mammoth High Park fire raged unhindered in mountain wilderness west of Fort Collins, destroying 257 rural homesteads and cabins, while residents of cities and suburbs to the east held their collective breath and prayed that the flames would not reach them.

Experts are warning already fire-weary Coloradans that this could be the new routine for their state — that the blazes could rage all summer until the arrival of the autumn rains.

On Wednesday, the Waldo Canyon fire, named for a popular hiking area west of the state's second-largest city, Colorado Springs, continued to burn unchecked. It prompted the evacuation of 32,000 people in the metropolitan area of 600,000, including portions of the U.S. Air Force Academy.

The fire, which ignited Saturday, exploded late Tuesday, doubling in size in just hours. Propelled by winds blowing 60 mph, the blaze jumped barriers to scourge neighborhoods, destroying dozens of homes as well as such landmarks as the historic Flying W Ranch, a popular tourist attraction that drew as many as 1,000 people a night for music and western-style dining.

Susan Joy Paul had stood her ground inside the Colorado Springs home where she raised her now-grown children, until she heard the panic in a friend's voice on the phone. With the main highways clogged with 20,000 evacuees, she fled along back roads, finally reaching a vantage point where she could survey her Shadow Valley neighborhood.

"It looked like big red torches going up," she said. "That's when it hit me: Those are houses."

Tom Tidwell, chief of the U.S. Forest Service in Washington, said this year was the culmination of nearly a decade of record fire seasons. "Definitely we're having a changing climate," he said, adding that less snowfall in Colorado last winter brought the fire season to the state more than a month early.

"This significantly exceeds what we saw 10, 20, 30 years ago," said Tidwell, a former firefighter. He said the Colorado fires were especially dangerous because they were so erratic, adding that large fires could create their own weather patterns, rendering traditional weather forecasts unreliable.

Mammoth fires raged around the West in 2002, threatening giant sequoia groves in California, charring a million acres of southern Oregon forest land and forcing mass evacuations in New Mexico's high country. The amount of land burned nationally in wildfires declined later in the decade but then ballooned again last year, when parts of drought-stricken Texas were hit by waves of flames.

Dry weather and high temperatures are again producing incendiary conditions, with forecasters predicting higher-than-normal wildfire potential in much of the West, including the Sierra Nevada and portions of the Southwest and the Rockies.

In the Boulder area, residents have learned to keep a wary eye on the sky, watching not only the plume of smoke rising from the outskirts of town but also the slurry bombers roaring overhead to dump their loads.

By Wednesday, the fire was just a mile and a half from town, and authorities had evacuated 28 households and warned another 2,500 to be ready to flee.

Meanwhile, officials worry about the fatigue of thousands of firefighters on the line. In northern Colorado, where the 136-square-mile High Park fire has already destroyed hundreds of homes and killed one woman, fire managers offered to shift to Boulder and Colorado Springs to join the fights there.

President Obama planned to visit the state's fire zones Friday to thank firefighters.

Colorado's climate and vegetation have the capacity to create enormous fires. In summer 2002, the state's largest-ever blaze thwarted efforts to control it and marched ominously toward Denver with a fire front 20 miles long and 14 miles wide.

Meteorologists said the 15,000-foot smoke plume from the Hayman fire spawned nightly thunderstorms in neighboring states and triggered two tornadoes that spun through Kansas. Ultimately the Hayman fire destroyed 133 homes, forced the evacuation of more than 5,300 people and cost $40 million.

The newest blazes have sent Coloradans into a frenzied pitch of fire fear and loathing. Even outside the burn areas, days of record triple-digit heat and strong winds have created a dry-as-dust landscape.

In a state where exercise is a way of life for residents, the unpredictable nature of the fires has hot-wired nerves. People watch as the flames destroy groups of houses but leave one untouched. Children call their parents — and vice versa — each time the fire changes direction or someone spots a lightning strike.

Through tweets and dramatic fire pictures posted on social media sites, uneasy residents have reached out to friends and family — and anyone else who will listen to their stories of being in the path of unpredictable fires. Others talk about the panic they feel every time they see a firetruck hurry down the road.

"Any time I see or hear a firetruck race by our house, my chest and stomach get tight, especially if there has been recent lightning," said Roxanne Hawn, who lives just outside Denver, miles from the blaze. "It's like being afraid of heights — the clenching inside feels the same."

Felice Vigil, a mother of three, awoke Tuesday in the residential section of the Air Force Academy unable to breathe. Even though the fire was nearby, she had felt reassured that she and her family were safe because they were on a military installation.

But when she looked outside, she said, the smoke swirling through her yard was so thick it looked like a solid object, waist-high. "It was like something out of a Freddy Krueger movie," she said Wednesday.

By late afternoon, a sudden burst of wind had upended her patio furniture. The fire was racing toward the academy as military police rolled through the streets telling everyone to get out.

"I tried to be calm for my kids," she said, standing outside a YMCA evacuation shelter, "but inside I was terrified, completely panicked." With no idea whether her house survived, she is now staying with family. She took her children to the shelter so they could swim and get their minds off what they had seen.

There is little doubt this fire will stay with them, though. Gabe Vigil, 8, proudly held up a chalk drawing of a perfect house. "This is what I hope our house still looks like," he said.

Susan Joy Paul symbolizes Colorado's angst of just not knowing. She had kept her eye on the Waldo Canyon fire since it started Saturday.

On Tuesday, a friend told her the fire had jumped a nearby ridge, that the massive cloud of billowing smoke was heading her way. Already, daytime had turned to night as smoke blocked the sun. Giant flakes of ash — some as wide as her hand — swirled in her frontyard.

She heard an explosion, maybe a generator, and then the lights and TV went out. "This is not right. We shouldn't be here," she told her roommate. "I feel like we're in hell."

Two police cars drove down the street, bullhorns blaring for everyone to evacuate. "We had no time," she said.

She threw her laptop, her notes for the book she is writing, some food, pictures of her children and a backpack into her compact car and started driving. "It was so confusing. Black ash was flying around like bats. At every corner there were cops yelling at me, waving me in different directions," she said.

On Wednesday, Paul said she could almost forget about the nightmare that unfolded the night before. Almost, but not quite. "I need to cry," she said, her voice teetering on despair. "I need to but can't. Not yet. Not until I know."

Paul was camped at a local library, trying to get some work done, fearing the worst, praying that life as she knew it wasn't over.

"I want to see it, but I don't," she said of her home. "I want to see it like it was, but I know that's not going to happen."


Deam, a special correspondent, reported from Colorado Springs and Glionna from Las Vegas.

Times staff writers Julie Cart and Bettina Boxall in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-colorado-fires-20120628,0,5014184,full.story
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« Reply #185 on: June 29, 2012, 09:10:54 am »

There are a number of tree species in the US that only seed or at least their seeds won't germinate unless they have a wild fire...
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« Reply #186 on: July 01, 2012, 05:03:20 pm »


From the Los Angeles Times....

Heat wave: 13 dead, 3 million lose power in Mid-Atlantic storms

By MELANIE MASON and LAURA J. NELSON | 4:21PM - Saturday, June 30, 2012

An uprooted tree lies across a street near American University after a violent storm passed Friday through Washington, D.C. — Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/GettyImages/June 30, 2012.
An uprooted tree lies across a street near American University after a violent storm passed Friday
through Washington, D.C. — Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/GettyImages/June 30, 2012.


WASHINGTON — The violent storms that ripped through the eastern United States left at least 13 people dead and millions without power on a day when temperatures hovered in the triple digits.

The Mid-Atlantic region had already been baking in 100-plus-degree heat when lightning storms and winds of up to 80 mph tore through the area Friday night. On Saturday, crews worked to fix broken traffic signals, repair utility poles and restore power — and air conditioning — to more than 3 million people.

The high-speed winds are called a derecho, from the Spanish word for "straight ahead" — a long, bow-shaped band of storms that can hurtle across more than 240 miles in a matter of hours.

The violent weather was blamed for 13 deaths, including six in Virginia; two in New Jersey; two in Maryland and one each in Kentucky, Ohio and Washington, according to the Associated Press. The dead included a 90-year-old Virginia woman who was sleeping when a tree fell on her house, and young cousins who were camping when their tent was crushed by a tree.

At least 20 people were injured, according to the National Weather Service.

The governors of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Ohio, as well as local officials in Washington, declared states of emergency. Such declarations clear the way for officials to seek financial assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other relief organizations.

Officials said it could take utility companies days to restore power to the nine states affected, as far west as Indiana.

In northwest Washington, where an outdoor thermostat read 103 degrees Farenheit in late afternoon, the streets were littered with tree branches and debris.

In front of the Montenegro Embassy, yellow police tape cordoned off a patch of road and sidewalk where a sizable limb had snapped off a large tree and landed on a gray Infiniti sedan parked below, smashing the trunk.

“There was literally downed trees in one of our major roads,” said Nicholas Legambi, who had driven in from Baltimore. “My power is still out. A lot of people are still without power today in the suburbs.”

The Potomac Electric Power Company, which serves Washington and surrounding counties, estimated it would take several days, and perhaps up to a week, before power is fully restored.

“As soon as the storm passed, we had crews starting to assess the damage,” Thomas H. Graham, Pepco’s president, said in a statement. “We'll continue conducting a comprehensive assessment, which we'll use to strategically deploy crews. We'll work full force and around the clock until every customer is restored.”

Washingtonians found life turned upside down by inconveniences including spoiled food and delayed trains. Thousands of commuters were stranded after Amtrak suspended service between Washington and Philadelphia on Friday night. Trains were still not running Saturday afternoon.

One in 3 Americans was in extreme heat Saturday in an area of nearly 600,000 square miles experiencing unusually warm weather.

Washington and its suburbs were the hardest hit as temperatures soared above 104 degrees Friday, breaking the record for all-time highs. Officials encouraged residents to visit cooling centers, including libraries and public pools. They cautioned that the elderly, the sick and the very young are especially vulnerable to extreme temperatures.

“I urge all district residents to look out after their neighbors,” said Chris Geldart, who directs the city's homeland security and emergency management agency, in a statement. “If you know of anyone in your neighborhood that might need assistance, please look in on them. This is especially important if you have elderly or disabled neighbors.”


http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-dc-storms-13-dead-20120630,0,3915922.story
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« Reply #187 on: July 01, 2012, 07:01:07 pm »



Ancient Antarctic warmer and wetter

Home » News » Dunedin
By John Gibb on Sun, 1 Jul 2012
University of Otago | News: Dunedin

American research showing the ancient Antarctic was warmer and wetter than previously suspected highlights the value of the international Andrill scientific drilling project, University of Otago Prof Gary Wilson says.
The research shows the ancient Antarctic supported stunted trees and vegetation along its edges.

By examining the remnants of plant leaf wax found in sediment cores taken below the Ross Ice Shelf, scientists from the University of Southern California (USC), Louisiana State University and Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory determined summer temperatures along the Antarctic coast 15-20 million years ago were 11degC warmer than today.

Temperatures reached up to about 7degC, with several times more rain.

This occurred during a period of global warming in the middle Miocene epoch that coincided with increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Prof Wilson, who heads the University of Otago marine science department, said the outcomes showed the value of "the time and effort that it takes to get some of these answers".

Prof Wilson has been a member of the Andrill project's international scientific committee and has been closely involved in the project's work in the Antarctic.

"This is not about doing the easy work. It's about doing the important work," he said.

He was interested in studying previous global warming to better understand how the world's climate was likely to operate later this century.

At two sites in the Antarctic, in 2006 and 2007, Andrill, the Antarctic Drilling Project, gathered information about past periods of global warming and cooling.

International scientists, including from New Zealand and the United States, drilled through ice, sea water, sediment and rock to a depth exceeding 1200m, recovering a core record nearly 20 million years old.

Sarah Feakins, an assistant professor of earth sciences at USC, was the lead author of a paper on the research just published in Nature Geoscience.

 Scientists began to suspect that high-latitude temperatures during the middle Miocene were warmer than previously believed when Sophie Warny, co-author of the Nature Geoscience paper, and an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, discovered large quantities of pollen and algae in sediment cores taken in the Antarctic.

Plant fossils in the Antarctic are hard to find because massive ice sheets covering the landmass grind away the evidence.

Deep sea cores were ideal to look for "clues of past vegetation" because the fossils deposited were protected from ice sheets but were difficult to acquire and required international collaboration, Prof Warny said.

Leaf wax found in the sediment cores acts as a record of climate change by documenting details about the hydrogen isotope ratios of water the plant drank while it was alive.

- john.gibb@odt.co.nz

http://www.odt.co.nz/campus/university-otago/215076/ancient-antarctic-warmer-and-wetter

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« Reply #188 on: July 01, 2012, 08:01:14 pm »

There are a number of tree species in the US that only seed or at least their seeds won't germinate unless they have a wild fire...

Same applies for many Australian tree species as well.
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« Reply #189 on: July 08, 2012, 02:42:07 pm »



OK, we've reduced too many greenhouse gas emissions
  • The 100-year global warming period has finished
  • we're back to beginning a new ICE AGE


Bring back the Orion Coal range and the open fires  

Warning as waterways freeze
Newstalk ZB
July 8, 2012, 8:19 am

As the cold snap continues, Queenstown's harbour master is warning people not to venture out onto frozen waterways.

Marty Black says ice has affected some areas of the region's lakes and there are also a number of frozen over ponds around the district.

He says parents need to remain vigilant around waterways .

"Supervised by adults may be ok, but youngsters on their own - definitely a no-no."

Marty Black says while ice could look thick enough to hold a lot of weight, that might not be the case in reality.

http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/14161165/warning-as-waterways-freeze/

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« Reply #190 on: July 08, 2012, 03:11:37 pm »


From the Los Angeles Times....

Heat wave: 13 dead, 3 million lose power in Mid-Atlantic storms

You know, its strange, but there were wildfires that spanned whole American counties in the 1800's.  Zane Grey wrote stories about them.
I guess they're inconvenient memories now.....  As is the fact that the population until recently, was a fraction of what it is now and people have expanded into danger areas - and also expanded their 'heat-sink' cities.
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« Reply #191 on: July 08, 2012, 04:54:50 pm »

I often wonder if the story about the Spanish galleon found in the Texan desert several miles inland from the gulf is true. No record of the storm that carried it there of course so it didn't happen.
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« Reply #192 on: July 09, 2012, 12:17:38 pm »

lol

Carbon tax cost added to family's funeral bill
Simon Benson The Daily Telegraph July 09, 2012 12:00AM

A GRIEVING family claims that a cemetery slapped them with a $55 carbon tax bill for burying a relative - saying "even the dead don't escape the carbon tax" - just days after the tax was introduced.

The outraged family complained to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, describing it as a "tax on the dying".

Erica Maliki said the Melbourne cemetery told her and two other relatives that a $55 charge would be applied to her father-in-law's burial due to the carbon tax.

The director of the Springvale Cemetery did not return calls despite several attempts to contact management since last Friday.

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said it would be "reprehensible" if any cemetery took advantage of grieving families by misleading them over funeral expenses.

It comes as three companies were reprimanded by the consumer watchdog for cashing in on the carbon tax.

The ACCC said that it was investigating solar panel suppliers

Polaris Solar and ACT Renewable Energy for providing false information on the cost impacts of the tax, while bakery chain Brumby's was caught advising outlets to raise prices and blame the carbon tax.

While cemeteries are not liable entities under the carbon tax, the funeral industry has previously warned of indirect price rises for both burials as well as cremations through higher energy prices and councils passing on their carbon tax costs.

But it said the impacts should not be immediate nor any greater than any other business.

Ms Maliki, a mother and community worker, said her father-in-law died on June 30 - a day before the carbon tax came into operation - but was buried early last week.

She said when her grieving family was discussing with the cemetery management the cost of a $600 retaining wall for the plot, which she claimed was never installed, they were informed that the price per plot had risen by $55 due to the tax.

"I thought to myself what carbon could possibly be used by putting a man in a grave," Ms Maliki said.

"All they did was put the dirt back in. How can they charge us a carbon tax for burying someone?

"It is a tax for dying."

Son Zaid Maliki said he was shocked when the receptionist at the cemetery informed the family that the cost of his father's burial had gone up because of the tax.

He said the receptionist told his sister-in-law, " ... even the dead don't escape the carbon tax". "We are pretty upset ... that comment was a kick in the guts," he said.

The ACCC said it would be willing to investigate the Malikis' claims. The issue has also been brought to the attention of several Labor MPs.

The ACCC warned businesses generally that while they had a right to set their own prices, any claims made in relation to carbon tax must be "truthful and have a reasonable basis".

An ACCC spokesman confirmed that any questionable claims about carbon tax increases did not necessarily have to be made in writing or included on a bill and even verbal claims would be investigated.

NSW Funeral Directors Association spokesman John Kaus said: "We don't really see there will be a real impact on the funeral industry. We don't envisage an impact greater than any other business entity."

Opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt called for an immediate exemption for funerals.

"The carbon tax is not just a farce but an insult. It is a tax that now follows you to the grave," Mr Hunt said yesterday.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/carbon-tax-cost-added-to-familys-funeral-bill/story-e6freuy9-1226420545281
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« Reply #193 on: July 09, 2012, 12:40:05 pm »

so when the body starts rotting decomposing in the ground along with the casket made out of wood chip and lots of glue plus the fabric lining the coffin and lets not for get the flowers and all the other stuff placed in the coffin start decomposing what happens to all those gases ?

dont they ooze out into the soil and rise up the 6 feet to the surface and enter the atmosphere ... ?

isnt that what causes the greenhouse effect ..... ?

seems to me that $55 is cheap as chips really compared to all the rest of the charges undertakers charge ....

thank god for cremations less harm done to the atmosphere and the ashes dont take up much room in ther ground  Grin
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« Reply #194 on: July 12, 2012, 10:09:41 am »

I know I have commented on horticulturists pumping CO2 into greenhouses to increase plant growth before.

I just can't figure out which threat - I have searched.

...anyway this is a little more comformation the plants have a role in all this that will surprise some.




Carbon dioxide intake soars


PALOMA MIGONE

Last updated 06:42 12/07/2012



 Scientists have discovered that plants, trees and soil have abruptly increased their atmospheric carbon dioxide intake in the last 20 years.

The land biosphere was taking in about one billion tonnes of carbon per year since 1988, equal to about 10 per cent of the global fossil fuel emissions for 2010.

However, the sudden shift didn't mean people shouldn't worry about climate change in the future, Niwa atmospheric scientist Dr Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher said.

Without nature's new uptake regime, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere would probably have increased even more rapidly over the last two decades.

And if the change was temporary, reducing C02 levels in the future might get harder.

''At the end of the day there may have been this natural sink which has tremendously been to our advantage, but that has not stopped CO2 from increasing in the atmosphere,'' Dr Mikaloff-Fletcher said.

''It's not enough. CO2 is still increasing in the atmosphere at an alarming rate.''

The discovery was reported in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, written by an international team of scientists including Dr Mikaloff-Fletcher.

She said while the study showed there was a natural shift, scientists didn't know how it would change in the future.

''We don't yet know whether or not the natural process is going to cause a permanent shift towards this increase uptake or if that's something that could be reversed or something that can be enhanced.

''That's going to be the subject of the next series of studies on this topic.''

Scientists explored whether the increase could be explained by the EL Nino Southern Oscillation (Enso) - and it couldn't.

''We also tried volcanic activity. A little bit after the shift happened, in 1991, there was a big eruption, but the problem was that the shift happened too early,'' Dr Mikaloff-Fletcher said.

Kevin Tate, research associate at Landcare Research, said he was ''intrigued'' by the findings.

''One thought struck me and that is that perhaps to this point we have underestimated the size of the terrestrial sink, and this work may be correcting that.''

He believed a number of factors could have contributed to the increase, such as CO2 fertilisation, and afforestation and reforestation.

Some sources like deforestation and permafrost melting may have been overestimated previously as well.

''While this result is intriguing, it must be remembered that terrestrial sinks are finite, and there is a strong likelihood that the terrestrial sink will become increasingly saturated in coming decades.''

Researchers already knew that over half of the emissions of C02 from human activities were absorbed by the land biosphere and the oceans. But Dr Mikaloff-Fletcher said the ''natural sinks'' were difficult to quantify directly.

Using data from 1958 and mathematical techniques that haven't been widely used in the field, scientists took the amount of emissions and subtracted what was retained in the atmosphere and what the oceans took up, leaving the land component for the study.

They noticed the abrupt shift in 1988, when the intake of 0.3 billion tonnes of carbon per year surged to one billion tonnes.

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was calculated from a global network of stations, including Niwa's sites in New Zealand and Antarctica.
 http://www.stuff.co.nz/science/7265266/Carbon-dioxide-intake-soars
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« Reply #195 on: July 12, 2012, 12:35:30 pm »

In other words, their computer models were wrong - Again!
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sickofpollies
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« Reply #196 on: July 12, 2012, 01:59:34 pm »

You only have to read the harry_readme.txt file (from the Climategate files) to realise just how crappy the algorithms can be for the "human induced climate change" computer models.

The harry_readme.txt file also demonstrates just how doctored the algorithm is to produce the desired results, at least for the University of East Anglia's climate research unit and the hockey team in general. In fact it is far more condemning that the emails from either Climategate I or II. It's a huge indictment on the hockey team; the file just doesn't have the snappy dialogue of corruption that the emails have (like using "Mike's Nature trick to hide the decline" and being advocates for "the cause" or condemning those that don't commit to "the cause".)
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Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus
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« Reply #197 on: July 12, 2012, 05:08:18 pm »

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2171973/Tree-ring-study-proves-climate-WARMER-Roman-Medieval-times-modern-industrial-age.html

Those bastard Romans and their climate changing chariots!
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« Reply #198 on: July 13, 2012, 03:38:26 pm »


Wellington sea level rising fastest in NZ

By MATT STEWART - The Dominion Post | 7:10AM - Friday, 13 July 2012

FUTURE SHOCK: A storm tide flood under the worst-case scenario of a sea level rise of 1.5 metres by 2115.
FUTURE SHOCK: A storm tide flood under the worst-case scenario of a sea level rise of 1.5 metres by 2115.

PARTS OF coastal Wellington could be drowned if doomsday climate change predictions from a new study pan out over the next 100 years.

Two reports issued yesterday by Greater Wellington regional council show Wellington's sea level is the fastest rising in New Zealand — made worse by seismic rumblings causing the city to sink 1.7mm a year since 2000.

Worst-case scenarios coupling massive sea level rise with intense storm floods show low-lying coastal parts of the Eastbourne bays, Petone, Pauatahanui, as well as the river mouths at Otaki, Hutt, Whakataki (near Castlepoint), and Waikanae and the lower Wairarapa valley, could be forever swamped if sea levels rose 1.5m by 2115.

Paekakariki, Raumati South and Te Kopi would also be jeopardised by severe erosion.

"We're starting to see potentially severe impacts in those areas," Greater Wellington senior hazards analyst Iain Dawe said.

Downtown Wellington would be spared permanent inundation because the city's seawall would protect it from erosion, and its stormwater system would gradually drain the flood.

The harbour also protects the city because wave run-up — where swells slop over the foreshore in a storm — was not as pronounced in the CBD as in places such as the south coast.

The reports urge immediate action and aim to help urban planners make building, road and infrastructure development decisions in low-lying coastal areas.

"We need integrated coastal management in the region with authorities working together to plan for natural disasters in the future," Dr Dawe said.

The research was done by National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research scientists.

The reports highlighted areas vulnerable to coastal flooding over the next 100 years.

Wellington Harbour had an average sea level rise of about 2mm a year over the past century. This was mainly due to climate change but was magnified by subsidence in the city over the past decade, caused by slow slips triggered by deep tectonic plate movements.

The region has "a more complicated spatial and temporal pattern of long- term relative sea level rise than other stable parts of New Zealand," the reports say.

Like land, the sea is not flat and has its own topography, which explains why Wellington could record a bigger rise than ports at Auckland, Dunedin and Christchurch. If the Wellington Fault ruptured, forecasts show Lower Hutt and Petone could subside by up to 1m.

Projections for century's end suggest the sea level in the Wellington region could rise by 0.8m by the 2090s or as high as 1.5m by 2115.

Storms could also get longer and stronger, increasing the likelihood of coastal flooding and erosion.


Sea-level variability and trends: Wellington Region (5.29MB PDF document)

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/wellington-central/7268184/Wellington-sea-level-rising-fastest-in-NZ
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« Reply #199 on: July 13, 2012, 05:28:33 pm »

That would be modelled with one of NIWAs computers, right?  Roll Eyes
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