Game. Over. Near Term Extinction by 2100.

Scientists state climate is more sensitive to increased carbon than previously thought and predict 7-1/2 degrees Celsius temperature rise by 2100.

From The Independent: Climate change may be escalating so fast it could be 'game over', scientists warn.

Mark Lynas laid out what would happen as the temperature rises in his award-winning book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet.

He was shocked by the researchers’ results.

“It sounds on the apocalyptic side of bad and, in some ways, it is realistic because ‘business as usual’ just got more likely as Trump wants to rebuild the pipelines … the complete ‘fossilisation’ of the US,” he said.

“It was game over at six [degrees] to be honest. I don’t think there was much more to add, other than turning the planet into Venus.”

That's what it looks like for the climate and the ability for the planet to sustain life, thanks to Obama's "Drill, Baby Drill" policies (after stating on election night 2008 that global warming and oceanic warming will have stopped that night according to his prediction of what History will write about his administration). Now we have Donald Trump's team promising to bring back oil, gas, clean coal and promising to defund climate science at all agegencies in the US government. I guess that includes the National Weather Service -- weather is just the day-to-day variability of climate and therefore meterology is a climate science. So I guess AccuWeather or the Weather Channel will get the concession to do the government weather forecasts, huh? At the very least, we're going in for business as usual and probably going for it blindly into the future, to boot.

And do you know who I blame the most? Not Trump. Not the GOP. But Obama, Slick Willie, Hillary, and the DNC for ruining the Dems' political capital on Obamacare and for running a supremely lousy campaign that never positively hooked up to the White Working Class and their values like it needed to.

THANKS, DNC Liberals!

"DANGEROUS CLIMATE CHANGE" read the yellow warning sign...

The Coming Global Superstorms

In many ways, it will not be as bad as The Coming Global Superstorm or The Day After Tomorrow, but in other ways it could be ten times worse.

Scientists Warn of Perilous Climate Shift Within Decades, Not Centuries

By Justin Gillis, The New York Times, March 22, 2016

GIANT boulder set in place in The Bahamas the last time we had global superstorms.
That was 120,000 years ago.
Source: Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post, via Getty Images, via The New York Times.



The nations of the world agreed years ago to try to limit global warming to a level they hoped would prove somewhat tolerable. But leading climate scientists warned on Tuesday that permitting a warming of that magnitude would actually be quite dangerous.

 

The likely consequences would include killer storms stronger than any in modern times, the disintegration of large parts of the polar ice sheets and a rise of the sea sufficient to begin drowning the world’s coastal cities before the end of this century, the scientists declared.

 

“We’re in danger of handing young people a situation that’s out of their control,” said James E. Hansen, the retired NASA climate scientist who led the new research. The findings were released Tuesday morning by a European science journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

 

The basic claim of the paper is that by burning fossil fuels at a prodigious pace and pouring heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, humanity is about to provoke an abrupt climate shift.

Thing is, for the month of February, we've already peeked above the global 1.5 C temperature rise that the COP21 agreed to target to stay below sea-level rise that would be dangerous to the low-lying island and river-delta nations. And the World Meteorological Organization has noted that the extreme temperature rises and the attendant climate-related events at the beginning of this year have shocked scientists around the climate science community, and implied that dangerous climate change has arrived by noting that the events and temps that have just happened have never been seen before in our historical records.

"The alarming rate of change we are now witnessing in our climate as a result of greenhouse gas emissions is unprecedented in modern records." — Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization

The WMO notes a number of extreme and significant climate change related events in its most recent annual report. A series of events that, according to monthly monitoring by NOAA, continued on into a record hot February of 2016. Image source: NOAA. via Robertscribbler.

And a few days before, Robertscribbler noted that without a fast switch to renewables (hydro, solar, wind) and of course, to conservation, rapid climate change could be imminent: a study done in Australia notes that if we continue to increase the extraction, mining and combustion of fossil fuels as usual, we could reach and blow through in 2030 the 2C limit when the really dangerous climate change -- i.e., the coming global superstorms -- develops.

And any related shift in global policy back toward coal, while continuing to build out oil and gas production and consumption based infrastructure would rapidly re-assert the dangerous rates of atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions growth the world has seen over the past few decades. In addition, all current indicators show use of natural gas and oil continuing to expand. And without coordinate reductions in these other two big carbon emitters, a floor will be set on how far greenhouse gas emissions can fall through the, admittedly positive, apparent shift away from coal alone.

As the Australian scientists note ... — you can’t really have much hope of a milder impact from climate change unless you rapidly replace all new growth-based infrastructure with renewables (and related non-carbon emitters). Any new fossil fuel based infrastructure is basically making an already bad problem worse. And continued wholesale reliance on fossil fuels locks in catastrophic climate change over very short time horizons.

Are we -- that is, the movers, shakers and drivers of our economy -- going to do the switchover necessary to forestall this dangerous climate change? After all, the other side peak oil may not hit until 2030, and we could be at or above the limit of 2C temperature rise since the 1880s, and get cast headlong into the age of the global superstorms, with frontal systems the size of mid-size continents and the strength of Category 5 Hurricanes.

From before the Paris Summit -- Top Climate Expert: Crisis is Worse Than We Think & Scientists Are Self-Censoring to Downplay Risk

The following video below is from Democracy Now!, and is available on You Tube here.

British climate scientist Kevin Anderson, Deputy Director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester is interviewed by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!. In the interview Dr. [or Mr.] Anderson states that the Earth Changes in its climate constitute much more of a crisis, i.e. are much worse, than most people think. And he is not at all surprised that the USA negotiating team refused to agree to anything in the agreement that would be binding.

Top Scientists Don't Hold Back on Weird Weather and Anthropogenic Global Warming.

From Robertscribbler.

Top scientists from all over the world are now speaking out about climate change: that yes, the present weird weather including the El Diablo (El Nino on streroids) is linked with the increasing carbon content in our atmosphere, brought to you by our Happy Motoring!^(TM) lifestyle.

UK Floods. Source: Her Majesty's Government of the UK (Hat tip to dtlange)

 Amidst Disasters Around the World, Top Scientists Declare Links Between Extreme Weather and Climate Change

By Robertscribbler
31 December 2015

Andy Lee Robinson said it all-too-well — “El Nino + Climate Change = El Diablo.”

And as the Washington Post so cogently notes — the world is now experiencing a rash of Freakish Weather from the North Pole to South America. It’s what appears to be happening as these two major record weather makers fire off simultaneously. A grim tally that includes the highest river levels ever seen in Missouri, the worst floods England has seen since the Middle Ages, the first time the North Pole has seen significantly above freezing temperatures during Winter in modern record keeping, city and region-crippling droughts spanning Central and South America, and seemingly everywhere, but especially in the North Atlantic where Greenland melt outflow has backed up the Gulf Stream, storms that seem to laugh in the face of our weather history.

Dr. Jeff Masters, at Weather Underground, yesterday made this grim observation:

“This isn’t the climate I grew up with. We didn’t see this kind of weather in the 20th century. It’s just a continuation of the crazy weather we’ve seen over the course of the 21st century so far.”

Attributing Single Extreme Weather Events to Climate Change

But Dr. Masters will be the first to tell you that it’s tough to scientifically prove that any one storm or weather system was altered by climate change. In essence, it’s like trying to prove that this home-run or that shut-out was caused by a baseball player taking steroids. We know that the steroids result in a changed performance by the athlete, just as we know that climate change alters the overall performance of weather. But it’s devilishly difficult for scientists to pin down the exact climate change mechanisms going into this or that monster storm or mega-drought. It doesn’t mean that climate change or steroids aren’t at work, because they are. It’s just hard to pin down exactly when.

It’s this gray area that climate change deniers and fossil fuel backers have exploited to generate doubt that climate change is happening at all. They’ve hyper-focused on this storm or that drought, rather than the larger extreme weather and temperature trend — which is clearly changing and worsening. It’s almost as if a group of baseball fans got together to defend the use of steroids in the sport and placed the burden of proof on whether or not an individual home run was caused by the stuff. A false analysis that puts both scientists and those concerned about the environment into the ridiculous position of having to prove the existence of climate change in one storm or a single drought. The ludicrous assumption being that, otherwise, climate change doesn’t exist at all.

But merchant of doubters didn’t count on one thing — the advancement of science.

http://robertscribbler.com/2015/12/31/amidst-disasters-around-the-world-top-scientists-declare-links-between-extreme-weather-and-climate-change/

And it's not just Dr. Jeff Masters (two tips o' th' hat to todaysguestis). Several other scientists weighed in on the link between global warming and our weird weather, according to the UK Independent:

“There is no doubt in my mind that climate change is partly responsible for the flooding across the north of England. These floods are in part due to greenhouse gas emissions.” 

Climate scientist Professor Piers Forster, University of Leeds

“Simple physics tells us that warmer air can hold more water vapour. The global warming that we have experienced so far has increased the atmosphere’s moisture storage capacity by about seven per cent. This is undisputed science and it clearly increases the potential for extreme rainfall and flooding.”

Paul Williams, meterologist at Reading University (UK)

It is undeniably true that warmer air can hold more moisture, just as warmer oceans increase the moisture content of the atmosphere by about six per cent for every 1C warming. In simple terms, the more moisture there is in the atmosphere, the more additional energy it contains. “So from basic physical understanding of weather systems it is entirely plausible that climate change has exacerbated what has been a period of very wet and stormy weather arising from natural variability.”

Dame Julia Sligo, the chief scientist at the Met Office

"We found that global warming increased the likelihood of the heavy precipitation associated with a storm like Desmond. An event like this is now roughly 40 per cent more likely due to climate change than it was in the past, with an uncertainty range of five to 80 per cent.”

Friederike Otto of Oxford University

(Dr. Otto is a co-author of a study already submitted to a peer-reviewed journal suggesting that climate change has increased the chances of Desmond-like storms by about 40 per cent and prepared by a team of scientists from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the University of Oxford.)

"The armchair meteorologists who continue to insist this is all just weather are starting to sound a little bit like Aunty Mabel expressing surprise at her remarkable luck in boardgames. The weather has changed, and we have changed it: get used to it. Those with more open minds are asking, ‘Is this the new normal?’ Unfortunately, the answer is ‘No’ – ‘normal weather’, unchanged over generations apart from random fluctuations, is a thing of the past."

Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University

And Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State University, co-author of Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change and creator of the "infamous" hockey-stick curve weighs in on this, too, in an interview with MSNBC on the 2 January concerning El Niño, climate change and the recent extreme weather events (tip o' th' hat to dtlange).

And NASA says El Niño’s worst is yet to come!

NASA scientists are saying the warm weather cycle is expected to unload its biggest punch in early 2016.

According to its latest satellite imagery, the strong El Niño that’s been brewing in the Pacific Ocean has shown “no signs of waning” and is on pace to match or even surpass the 1997–98 El Niño event—the biggest ever recorded.

“In 2014, the current El Niño teased us—wavering off and on,” Josh Willis, project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. “But in early 2015, atmospheric conditions changed, and El Niño steadily expanded in the central and eastern Pacific.”

http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-el-ni-o-worst-yet-come-203204128.html;_ylt=AwrTccn1hIlWezMA0nEnnIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTEyYXAwN25lBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDQjExMTVfMQRzZWMDc2M-

So in the words of the immortal Margo Channing (Bette Davis): "Fasten your seatbelts! It's going to be a bumpy ride."