2017 IS Strange - Part 7 // February

Here's the next vid from Last Messages that's filled with weird weather, Earth changes, animal die-offs and other tragedies that aren't supposed to be happening, but are thanks to global warming / climate change.

And the fron image is a drone photo of this huge fishkill somewhere -- it looks like California or Australia.

2017 IS Strange - Part 6 // February

The latest from LAST MESSAGES including Batkills in Australia, the ongoing Orovill Dam diaster and hailstorm floods in Saudi Arabia.

2017 is strange. Enjoy, if you don't find it most distressing!

2017 Is Strange -- Parts 3, 4 and 5 // January-February

2017 is strange! And a heck of a lot happened in the past four weeks, all a result of Global Warming and her ugly twin, Global Weirding.

 2017 Is Strange Part 3 // January

2017 Is Strange Part 4 // January-February

2017 Is Strange Part 5 // February

And not just lots of weird weather, either: there are now lots of strange clouds, strange animal movements, invasions and die-offs including those of birds, bizaare sounds in the ambient environment, and new, strange sunsets -- all due to the two goddesses we called to life, Global Warming and Global Weirding by our greenhouse gas emissions from way too much burning of fossil fuels and the spraying of chemtrails by our flying of our commercial, military, government and private jet airplanes!

Well we screwed ourselves but good, now. 2017 is strange and 2018 promises to be stranger yet. 2019, stranger still. And so on and so on and so on. So ease back, and... relax that rear end of yours, and... enjoy! 😉

2017 Is Strange -- Part 2 January, and a callout to President Donald J. Trump.

Come on, Mr. President, look and learn! What, is, happening, to the sky???

2017 is strange. Enjoy, watch the skies, and learn, including you, Mr. President, that climate change is for real, and it's being caused by a more energetic atmosphere, itself being made more energetic by increasing amounts of Carbon Dioxide being coughed up by fossil-fuel burning by people, offices, governments and industry. Decarbonisation -- 100% Independence From Fossil Fuels -- will provide lots of jobs and counterintuitively will also consume a lot of fossil fuels to get up and running so we also will need a radical conservation program with 100% compliance to free up those fuels to achieve the decarbonisation.

How to achieve this? Slap a 35% tarriff on ALL fossil fuel imports coming into this country. Including the imported oil destined for the refineries to be reexported as refined products.

My namd is Edward Miessner, and I approve of this message, and the vid from LAST MESSAGES.

2017 Is Strange - Part 1 January

I had posted these types of videos on separate blogs for 2015 and 2016 but I've decided to incorporate the similar vids for 2017 here in this blog.

Here is the first video of the "2017 Is Strange" series by the YouTuber LAST MESSAGES.

2017 is strange. Enjoy!

2016 Is the Third Hottest Year in a Row.

The Boston Globe posted a picture touting a 60-degree January day as evidence of Global Warming. But it isn't. There were January thaws with daytime temps in the 60s in the 1970s when I was growing up in greater Boston. But it's the ocean warming and polar warming that's pushing up the annual mean temperatures, year over year over year over year.

For third straight time, Earth sets hottest year record

Justin Gillis and John Schwartz of The New York Times,  January 18, 2017

Source: The Boston Globe.

Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016 — trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row. 

.... 

The data show that politicians cannot wish the problem away. The Earth is heating up, a point long beyond serious scientific dispute, but one becoming more evident as the records keep falling. Temperatures are heading toward levels that many experts believe will pose a profound threat to both the natural world and to human civilization. 

In 2015 and 2016, the planetary warming was intensified by the weather pattern known as El Niño, in which the Pacific Ocean released a huge burst of energy and water vapor into the atmosphere. But the bigger factor in setting the records was the long-term trend of rising temperature, which scientists say is being driven by increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. 

“A single warm year is something of a curiosity,” said Deke Arndt, chief of global climate monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It’s really the trend, and the fact that we’re punching at the ceiling every year now, that is the real indicator that we’re undergoing big changes.”

For more, click here.

Five feet of Sea Level Rise by 2050? Ten feet at New Orleans in that Case.

I have recently found out that because of the destabilisation of the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets in general, and the Pine Island Glacier in particular, we could see five feet of global mean sea-level rise by 2050.  Due to the gravity effects of the loss of ice at the poles, New Orleans will see twice as much seal level rise as the global mean.

Meltwater from the east end of the East Antarctica ice sheet.
As if Greenland and West Antarctica ice melt weren't bad enough.

This is six feet rise in sea level at New Orleans.
This is from a global mean of three feet.
Source: New Orleans Advocate 

From The Huffington Post, 18 November 2016, U.S. Climate Envoy Jonathan Pershing: Five Feet Of Sea Level Rise By 2050 Possible.

The mood in Marrakech was somber when top climate envoy for President Barack Obama Jonathan Pershing dropped a bombshell on observers gathered there: The rapid warming in polar regions the world is now witnessing may result in five feet—or 1.5 meters— of sea level rise by 2050. 

Pershing had met earlier with State Department Secretary John Kerry in Morocco at the 22nd UN Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP22. Kerry had just returned from a trip to Antarctica. According to Pershing, Kerry told him that the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica “is moving very fast and when it goes, we will see 1.5 meters of sea level rise by 2050.” 

“Five feet of sea level rise in less than 35 years — that is really soon,” said Pershing. “There are 65 million people now living in a state of conflict and 140 million who live less than 3 feet above sea level.

I had reported on the effects of gravity influences on the effect on sea level rise at New Orleans here, based on information reported in the New Orleans Advocate, which has come out with a new article November 23rd on local sea level rise this century: Study hands New Orleans bleak sea rise outlook, with some of highest projections in the world.

Just when you think the news about sea level rise couldn’t get much worse for New Orleans, it has. 

According to a study released this month, the city will experience one of the highest increases in sea level among 138 coastal cities around the planet because of its location on the northern Gulf of Mexico. 

New Orleans could see as much as 14.5 inches of sea level rise by 2040, and 6.5 feet by 2100 if the world doesn’t act quickly to lower greenhouse gas emissions, the main driver of global warming. 

The populated parts of the city, of course, are protected by levees rising to about 22 feet. The increase would be most evident outside the levees

Of course the study that predicts a 14.5 inches' rise by 2040 and 6.5 feet by 2100 does not take into account the above information about the increasingly rapid disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctica ice caps that Pershing dropped on the climate change conference in Marrakesh.

And the ice melt has started on East Antarctica as well, at its east end, reported by Robertscribbler on November xx: Did Föhn Winds Just Melt Two Miles of East Antarctic Surface Ice in One Day?

Supraglacial lake is just another word for a surface glacial melt lake. And these new lakes pose a big issue for ice sheet stability. Surface melt lakes are darker than white glacier surfaces. They act as lenses that focus sunlight. And the comparatively warm waters of these lakes can flood into the glacier itself — increasing the overall heat energy of the ice mass.

But water at the glacier surface doesn’t just sit there. It often bores down into the ice sheet — producing impacts for months and years after the surface lake’s formation. Sub surface lakes can form in the shadow of surface ponds. Transferring heat into the glacier year after year. In other cases, water from these lakes punches all the way to the glacier’s base. There the added lubrication of water speeds the glacier’s flow. All of these processes generate stresses and make glaciers less stable. And it is the presence of surface melt ponds that has been responsible for so much of Greenland’s speeding melt during recent years.

Now, a similar process is impacting the largest concentration of land ice on the planet. And while Greenland holds enough ice to raise sea levels by around 21 feet, East Antarctica contains enough to lift the world’s oceans by about 195 feet. Surface melt there, as a result, produces considerably more risk to the coastal cities of the world.

In other words, it looks like even Pershing's dire warning at Marrakesh recently is now outdated. Oh, crap.

For more info click here, here, here, here, here [scroll down to EXTINCTION (Yes, it is real)], and here. 

The Bourgeoisiophene.

Karl Marx was right. Driven by the Bourgeoisie, Capitalism will continue until all the natural resources are exhausted, the workers are pauperised, and the natural realm, badly polluted. (Of course, based on his views concerning natural resources, Communism and Socialism weren't much better, or were even worse, depending on your perspective.)

From Truthdig: Paul Street, How to Stop Capitalism’s Deadly War With Nature (Link).

Source: Truthdig.com

Earth scientists now know that the history of our planet has been set for some time in our current geological age, the Anthropocene. According to leading experts Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen and John McNeill, in this era, “human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the earth into planetary terra incognita. The Earth is rapidly moving into a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier era.” We are living in a “no-analogue state” in which “the Earth system has recently moved well outside the range of natural variability.” ... ...

The terrible trends and data have led the venerable progressive political scientist and social-justice advocate Susan George to introduce what she calls “a new phenomenon in the history of humankind.” In a recent lecture to the International Centre for the Promotion of Human Rights in Buenos Aires, she names it “geocide,” meaning “the collective action of a single species among millions of other species which is changing planet Earth to the point that it can become unrecognisable and unfit for life.” Humanity, George says, “is committing geocide against all components of nature, whether microscopic organisms, plants, animals or against itself, homo sapiens, humankind.” George is unstinting in her denunciation of the human species: “Homo sapiens has only existed for roughly 200,000 years. The time we’ve spent on this planet compared to its total age is infinitesimally short, just the tiniest sliver of geological time. It amounts to a mere 0.00004 percent of Earth’s existence. And although any given species of plant or animal—vertebrate or invertebrate—tends to last on average about 10 million years, our species seems determined to cause its own extinction, along with the rest of creation, long before its allotted time.” ... ...

But is the culprit really Homo sapiens as a whole? The concept of the Anthropocene has rich scientific validity. It holds welcome political relevance in countering the carbon-industrial complex’s denial of humanity’s responsibility for contemporary climate change. Still, we must guard against lapsing into the historically unspecific and class-blind uses of the term “anthros,” and project the recent age of capital onto the broad 100,000-year swath of human activity on and in nature. As the brilliant and prolific environmental historian and political economist Jason Moore reminded Sasha Lilley during a KPFA radio interview in 2015: “It was not humanity as a whole that created … large-scale industry and the massive textile factories of Manchester in the 19th century or Detroit in the last century or Shenzhen today. It was capital.” It is only during a relatively small slice of human history—roughly the last 500 years, give or take a century or so—that humanity has been socially and institutionally wired from the top down to wreck livable ecology.

A compelling case has been made by Moore and other left environmentalists that it is more historically appropriate to understand humanity’s earth-altering assault on livable ecology as “the Capitalocene.” Capitalism has ruled the world since 1600 or thereabouts (by academic calculations), and only during this relatively brief period of history has human social organization developed the capacity and compulsion to transform earth systems. “Geocide” is a capitalist crime, not a transgression of humanity over its long and mostly noncapitalist history.

(Emphases in the above quote are mine)

For more, click here.

Scientists Warn World Will Miss Key Climate Target (UK Guardian).

Coral Reef in Fiji. Source: Alamy via UK Guardian.

Leading climate scientists have warned that the Earth is perilously close to breaking through a 1.5C upper limit for global warming, only eight months after the target was set. 

The decision to try to limit warming to 1.5C, measured in relation to pre-industrial temperatures, was the headline outcome of the Paris climate negotiations last December. The talks were hailed as a major success by scientists and campaigners, who claimed that, by setting the target, desertification, heatwaves, widespread flooding and other global warming impacts could be avoided. 

However, figures – based on Met Office data – prepared by meteorologist Ed Hawkins of Reading University show that average global temperatures were already more than 1C above pre-industrial levels for every month except one over the past year and peaked at +1.38C in February and March. Keeping within the 1.5C limit will be extremely difficult, say scientists, given these rises.

Atmospheric heating has been partly triggered by a major El Niño event in the Pacific, with 2016 expected to be the hottest year on record. Temperatures above 50C have afflicted Iraq; India is experiencing one of the most intense monsoons on record; and drought-stricken California has been ravaged by wildfires. 

Stanford University’s Professor Chris Field, co-chair of the IPCC working group on adaptation to climate change, told the Observer: “From the perspective of my research I would say the 1.5C goal now looks impossible or at the very least, a very, very difficult task. We should be under no illusions about the task we face.”

For more information, click here and here.

New Article out on Global Warming.

An atoll in the island nation of Kiribati, which is only a few feet above sea level
Photo credit: Kadir van Lohiuzen, Noor Images via National Geographic.

Reported by the National Geographic, here. (I know, it's owned by Murdoch now, but what can you do?)

An annual report that is sometimes called the planet's "physical" finds that 2015 was the warmest year since records began in the mid to late 19th century. The year also marked several other milestones, from a record carbon concentration to an unusual number of tropical storms. 

The 26th report, State of the Climate in 2015, released online today by theAmerican Meteorological Society  (AMS), was compiled by hundreds of scientists from 62 countries and was peer reviewed.

Speaking of tropical storms, yesterday here in New Orleans an afternoon pop-up thunderstorm cloud ended up behaving like a tropical storm, with lots of leaves and small debris blown this way and that.

Here are the five key points made by the report, according to NatGeo:

1. In 2015 Earth was about 1 deg C (1.8 F) warmer than it was in the 1880s. Warmer still in 2016, with January through June being 1.3 deg C warmer than the pre-industrial era in the late 19th Century. This is when El Niño has lost his strength.

2. Sea-surface temps are the hottest ever since records were kept, aided by The Blob in the Northeast Pacific, despite the freshening and cooling by the Greenland ice melt in the North Atlantic.

3. Carbon Dioxide atmospheric content has passed the 400 ppm milestone. This was last witnessed in the middle Pliocene Era, 2-3 million years ago, or perhaps even the middle Miocene, 10-15 million years ago.

4. Global Sea-Level Rise is the highest since records were kept. The global mean sea level rise is now about 70 mm (2-3/4") higher than the levels taken in 1993, which in turn was a little bit higher than the 1988 value which was higher than the 1929 value; the post-1929 rise actually varied from town to town, due to gravity, land subsidence, seismic pressures, crustal springback because of melting ice caps, etc., etc.

5. Many parts of the world experienced extreme weather. This weird weather is well documented on YouTube by LAST MESSAGES in his 2015 IS STRANGE and 2016 IS STRANGE series (and more dating back to 2011) and by others.

For more information, click here.

"Retrotopia 2065" Second Draft of the Map.

Here's the second draft of the map I posted yesterday.

Other commenters remarked on Mr. Greer's big batch of tips he addressed to me and in turn, Mr. Greer came out with some more tips:

Ed-M, the Atlantic Republic is the present-day states of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, with the eastern (not western) panhandle of West Virginia; Washington DC is technically Atlantic territory but it's basically a ruin inhabited by squatters. West Canada is BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon Territory; Nunavut, I should have said, is an independent nation, having united with Kalaallit Nunaat (aka Greenland) in 2042. There's also the Free City of Chicago, which is an independent (and gaudily corrupt) nation, and consists of Cook County. I think that's it!

So I made some changes, but I kept the 2 degrees' Centigrade seal level rise for the East and Gulf Coasts, because the author of the Dredd Blogg has indicated that these coasts will get the worst of the sea-level rises. For example, Miami-Dade and Fort Lauderdale have a solid foot of risen sea level compared with the global eight inches since 1870, today!. Therefore for a global six feet, expect between ten and twenty feet sea level rise for the two shorelines.

For proof, click on the Dredd Blog tag and you'll be directed to his Post Series page. Scroll down to EXTINCTION (Yes, it is real) and then to various series on SEA LEVEL CHANGE. You'll find many posts under these topics that show that sea-level rise from global warming is not uniform, but varies all over the planet -- another component of global weirding.  For example, one post in particular discusses past and future sea level rise around Miami (click here).

Peak Oil Now or Else! Says the Earth.

From Flassbeck Economics on the ability of the IPCC, governments and scientists' worst case scenarios to keep up with what's actually happening:

The reality of Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD) continues to outstrip our ability to model worst-case scenarios, as it is happening so much faster than ever anticipated.Sixty-three percent of all human-generated carbon emissions have been produced in the last 25 years and science shows that there is a 40-year time lag between global emissions and climate impacts. This means that we have not even started to experience the consequences of our growing emissions (see here). In the meantime, nothing substantial, nothing efficient is happening to curb CO2 emissions.

For example:

• Late 2007:The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announcesthat the planet will see a one degree Celsius temperature increase due to climate change by 2100.
• Late 2008: The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research predicts a 2C increase by 2100.

We've already blown through the 1.0 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) increase from 1880s levels, we'll see a 2 degree Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) increase before too long. 2025?

The further predictions are dire and portrays scenarios which are extremely bad.

To avoid them we have to get off of fossil fuels as soon as possible and start sequestering carbon as soon as possible too. But that essentially requires a change in the corporate-driven capitalist system and a change of heart in humanity in general, in the American people in particular. Will the latter occur as it needs to? Morris Berman says it ain't gonna happen.

On the Peak Oil (Demand) Front...

Peak Oil demand is spreading more pain and gloom throughout the Oil Patch of the global economy.

The following two articles were posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer on The Automatic Earth yesterday and today.

The first one:  More Pain Seen For US Crude As Product Glut Adds To Gloom (Reuters)

A glut of refined products has worsened the already-grim outlook for U.S. crude oil for the rest of the year and the first half of 2017, traders warned this week, as the spread between near-term and future delivery prices reached its widest in five months. A stubborn, massive supply overhang punished crude over the winter as U.S. oil futures hit 12-year lows in February. As supply outages and production cuts increased, crude rallied and spreads tightened significantly in May. But the unusually large amount of gasoline and oil in storage, combined with expectations of a ramp-up in crude production, has made traders more bearish on the price outlook for late 2016 and early 2017.

The second one: Fracklog in Biggest US Oil Field May All But Disappear (Bloomberg)

The number of dormant crude and natural gas wells in the U.S. stopped growing in the first quarter – and may all but disappear in the nation’s biggest oil field should prices hold steady. As of April 1, there were 4,230 wells left idle after being drilled, a figure little changed from January, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Intelligence. While some explorers have continued to grow their fracklog of drilled but not yet hydraulically fractured wells, others began tapping them in February as oil prices rose, the report showed.

Crude in the $40- to $50-a-barrel range may wipe out most of the fracklog in Texas’s Permian Basin and as much as 70% of the inventory in its Eagle Ford play by the end of 2017, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Andrew Cosgrove. While bringing them online is the cheapest way of taking advantage of higher prices, the wave of new supply also threatens to kill the fragile recovery that oil and gas markets have seen so far this year. “We think that by the end of the third quarter, beginning of the fourth quarter, the bullish catalyst of falling U.S. production will be all but gone,” Cosgrove said in an interview Thursday. “You’ll start to see U.S. production flat lining.”

"Higher oil prices," that is, in the $40 to $50 range, can entice the extractors to return to pump out or frack out the wells that are dormant, or just drilled and capped. Unfortunately, according to the above Reuters article, and oil price developments today, those higher prices cannot be guaranteed. As Raúl Meijer says, What’s going to happen to the lenders who made it all possible?

Now the latest from The Wall Street Journal:

Oil prices fell Friday as a glut in oil products stoked market concerns that the global crude market will remain oversupplied longer than expected. 

U.S. crude oil for September delivery recently fell 54 cents, or 1.2%, to $44.21 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent, the global benchmark, fell 58 cents, or 1.3%, to $45.62 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe.

This simple chart explains why oil prices are so low compared to those in 2014.
Source: vox.com.

Demand is not keeping up with supply, despite an amount lower than the peak extracted in July of 2015. A NEW oil production peak, projected for the end of 2016, is not expected to outstrip demand. Which means there will be an even BIGGER glut and a backup in oil supplies being delivered because consumption by the end user is not fast enough. And storing all that oil has got to cost a lot of money.

Now what's the cause of this new oil peak? It is certainly not demand. But the lenders have to be paid, the social welfare systems of the producer countries have to be supported, companies' employee payrolls have to be met (otherwise employees get laid off), and some amount has to be set aside or spent for maintenance, exploration, drilling of new wells, and overhead, especially if lenders become loath to lend any more money to the fossil fuels industry.

Eventually the oil producers and oil producing companies will have to wise up, and reduce the supply to clear out the glut and backup of oil, in order to get the prices to go back up to a level where they can make a profit, "hopefully" at a price the end consumer can afford*.

* "Hopefully" at a price the consumer can afford: this would be good for the economy, which always has to grow to keep people employed and governments to meet its obligations and lenders to be repaid, but it would be TERRIBLE for the biosphere, us and our civilization, all of which depend on a salubrious climate that doesn't change more rapidly than species and ecosystems can adapt. Burning of more fossil fuels means more Carbon Dioxide in the air which means more and faster Global Weirding... with the coming superstorms the size of continents and the strength of hurricanes coming sooner and more frequently. One already happened last winter.

Clouds Tracking Further North Just as Predicted by the 'Warmists'.

Thanks to the Fossil Fuels Derivatives Beast.

The Fossil Fuels Derivatives Beast.

Yes, I'm using the Denialists' term for climate scientists and others concerned about global warming.  It ought to get the Denialists' goat to be proven wrong!  See below.

Now from the Washington Post, a new analysis of satellite photo records shows that over the past four decades, since 1983 in fact, the cloud and storm tracks have been adjusting their positions poleward.

‘The most singular of all the things that we have found': Clouds study alarms scientists

Chris Mooney - The Washington Post - 14 July 2016.

[A]ccording to leading climate scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan — credited with discovering that chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, are actually a greenhouse gas, among other major findings — a new study this week showing that clouds already are shifting their distributions across the Earth, and in a way predicted by climate change models, stands out. And not in a good way. 

The study was led by Ramanathan’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography colleague Joel Norris, though Ramanathan said he was not involved in the work and didn’t know about it until shortly before publication. But Ramanathan said that the study basically confirms that there’s nothing to prevent the world from reaching the high levels of warming that have long been feared — except for our own swift policy actions, that is. 

“My reaction was, my goodness,” Ramanathan said. “Maybe the 4 to 5 degree warming, certainly we were all wishing there was some certainty that would make it go away. So I consider the findings of this paper, the data shows major reorganization of the cloud system.” 

This matters because clouds are fundamental regulators of how much solar radiation makes it to the Earth’s surface (rather than being reflected back to space by white cloud tops), and how much infrared or “longwave” radiation escapes back to space once again.

For more information, click here, here and here.

But you know, what really grinds my gears is that people are still saying that "our own swift policy actions" can "prevent the world from reaching the high levels of warming that have long been feared." How are we going to do that? According to Robertscribbler, "Current greenhouse gas levels — topping out near 408 parts per million CO2 (and 490 parts per million CO2e) this year — will need to fall in order to prevent 1-3 C of additional warming." We're approaching 2 degrees C above 1880s levels already -- and although the planet's temperature will probably retreat to give us a 1.2 deg C avearge for all twelve months this year -- Ramanathan is right that current CO2 / CO2e levels are going to ramp warming up to the 4-5 deg. C mark.  We'll need to reduce the CO2 / CO2e levels. How are we going to avert that? Plant lots of trees even as multiple demands are causing deforestation all over the planet?

We need clean fuels to replace fossil fuels now and wind and solar may not be enough. How are we going to do that?  It seems right now, despite their ongoing financial troubles (which may cause fossil fuel production to remorselessly decline by way of disinvestment over the next several years), the fossil fuel industries and their bought (mainly "conservative") politicians are in the catbird seat right now, driving our fossil fuel dependency and this whole climate mess!

Impact of Sea Level Rise in Boston Worse than Previously Thought.

Again, it's all on the ice-melt in Antarctica and the release of water due to the reduced gravity of the shrunken Antarctic ice cap. The Law of Gravity works on objects on and orbitng Earth and every other planet, tides, solar systems, galaxies, and even water around ice caps and hoards of wealth!

From The Boston Globe:

The consequences of climate change on Boston are expected to be far more calamitous than previous studies have suggested, a new report commissioned by the city says. 

In the worst-case scenario, sea levels could rise more than 10 feet by the end of the century — nearly twice what was previously predicted — plunging about 30 percent of Boston under water. Temperatures in 2070 could exceed 90 degrees for 90 days a year, compared with an average of 11 days now.

The report, by scientists from the University of Massachusetts and other local universities, has raised concerns in City Hall just two weeks after Mayor Martin J. Walsh attended a climate summit in Beijing.

The updated projections for Boston take into account new research that suggests the accelerating melt of the ice sheets covering Antarctica will have a disproportionate impact on cities along the East Coast.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/06/22/climate-change-could-have-even-worse-impact-boston-than-previously-expected/S6hZ4nDPeUWNyTsx6ZckuL/story.html?event=event25

For more information:

Dredd.Blog: Greenland and Antarctica Invade the United States

Ecocosmology: The Gravity of Sea Level Change

Dredd Blog: Why Sea Level Rise May Be the Greatest Threat to Civilization

Climate Central predicts we will keep on feeding the Fossil Fuels Derivatives Beast more and more through 2040.

The Fossil Fuels Derivatives Beast. Source: Sandara.

The misleading headline reads:

Global 2040 Forecast Sees Only Slight Fall in Fossil Fuels

Article by Bobby Magill, Climatecentral.org, 11 May 2016

I doubt he wrote the headline, though.

Now, snippets from the rest of the story.

Despite the urgency to cut greenhouse gas emissions as climate change bears down on the globe, fossil fuel use is not likely to change much in the coming decades. Though renewable energy will grow quickly though 2040, gasoline and diesel will still move most of the world’s vehicles, and coal will still be the largest single source of carbon emissions.

Those are the conclusions of a forecast released by the federal government on Wednesday for how the world will use energy and what its carbon dioxide emissions will be over the next 25 years.

Feeding the Fossil Fuels Derivatives Beast.
Gasoline and diesel will likely remain the globe's biggest transportation fuels in the coming decades.
Credit: Michael Kappel/flickr via Climate Central.

The US Energy Information Administration predicts that as a whole, we will be feeding the Fossil Fuels Derivatives Beast more and more emissions (those are the derivatives, dear reader) through 2040:

Credit: US EIA via Climate Central.

Global carbon emissions from energy consumption are expected to grow at an average rate of 1 percent per year between 2012 and 2040, growing a total 34 percent in that time as fossil fuels provide the world with more than three quarters of its energy.

“With existing policies and regulations, worldwide energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will go from about 32 billion metric tons in 2012 to something like 43 billion metric tons out to the year 2040,” EIA administrator Adam Sieminski said.

And will consumption of fossil fuels decrease as a whole though 2040? Noooooooo...!

Look here:

Credit: US EIA via Climate Central.

Unless there are unexpected changes in global climate policy over the next 25 years, coal will still be the world’s king of carbon emissions in 2040.

Coal is expected to account for 38 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2040, down from 43 percent in 2012. Annual growth of coal use by that time is expected to be about 0.6 percent. In 1990, coal was responsible for 39 percent of global carbon emissions. Natural gas, by comparison, will account for 26 percent of global carbon emissions in 2040, up from 20 percent in 2012.

Although renewables will enlarge from about 12 to about 25 percent, fossil fuels will still hold the lion's share at 75 percent. And the actual amount of fossil fuels that will be consumed in 2014 will be larger than the actual amount consumed in 2012!

More here.

We will probably break through 500 ppm of CO₂ in the Atmosphere vs 400 ppm today, and definitely through 500 ppm of CO₂e. We're at 485 ppm CO₂e already and we're already making the Fossil Fuels Derivatives Beast more and more active! See my sister blog, 2016 is strange!.

Imagine how bad the Fossil Fuels Derivatives Beast will behave when we're at 500ppm.

Tip o' th' hat to Elaine Meinel Supkis.

Weird Weather: What the Hell Is Going On!?

Ya know, what we need is someone with the “charisma” of Donald Trump to rise up and say, “We need to stop, just stop, burning fossil fuels until those in charge can tell us what the hell is going on?”

I'm reblogging two posts from Robertscribbler about the weird weather that's been going on.

First, a new item about how the mangled Jet Stream has permitted so much warm air into the Arctic, it's forcing its way into NW Siberia and causing an Arctic Vortex invasion into East Asia, even Southeast Asia.

NW Siberian Warm Snap and East Asian Cold Snap
Source: Earth Nullschool via Robertscribbler.

Arctic Heatwave Drives Deadly Asian Cold Snap
by Robertscribbler, 26 January 2016 Link

In the Arctic today, there’s a warm wind howling over Siberia. It’s a wind blowing from the northwest. A wind originating from the Arctic Ocean. Siberia is warming up today because warm air blew in from the direction of the North Pole. This should strike everyone as ridiculously, insanely odd.

In Okinawa it snowed for the first time since 1977 this weekend. In Taiwan, a cold snap turned deadly killing 85 as tens of thousands more huddled in homes that lacked any form of central heating. In South Korea, 500 flights were grounded due to unseasonable weather. In Hong Kong, the temperature was 3 C — the same temperature as a region near the southwestern coast of Svalbard east of Greenland and above the Arctic Circle.

What the hell is going on? In short, a global warming driven heat-up of the Arctic has punched a hole in the Jet Stream and driven chill, Arctic air all the way into portions of Southeast Asia that seldom ever see temperatures go below 60 degrees Fahrenheit (16 Celsius).

http://robertscribbler.com/2016/01/26/arctic-heatwave-drives-deadly-asian-cold-snap/

Nested in the comments thread there is a video "What's Going on with El Nino?" posted by commenter dtlange:

 Which leads into the second post by Robertscribbler, concerning El Nino and why the massive storms that accompanied previoous El Ninos haven't shown up in California so far this year.

Polar Amplification vs a Godzilla El Nino — Is the Pacific Storm Track Being Shoved North by Arctic Warming?
by Robertscribbler, 26 January 2016 Link

It’s an El Nino year. One of the top three strongest El Ninos on record. The strongest by some NOAA measures. And we are certainly feeling its effects all over the world. From severe droughts in Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America, to Flooding in the Central and Eastern US, Southern Brazil, and India, these impacts, this year and last, have been extreme and wide-ranging. During recent days, Peru and Chile saw enormous ocean waves and high tides swamping coastlines. Record flooding and wave height events for some regions. All impacts related to both this powerful El Nino and the overall influence of human-forced warming by more than 1 C above 1880s temperatures on the whole of the hydrological cycle.

Amped up by a global warming related 7 percent increase in atmospheric water vapor (and a related increase in evaporation and precipitation over the Earth’s surface), many of these El Nino related impacts have followed a roughly expected pattern (you can learn more about typical El Nino patterns and links to climate change related forcings in this excellent video by Dr Kevin Trenberth here). However, so far, some of the predicted kinds of events you’d typically see during a strong El Nino have not yet emerged. A circumstance that may also be related to the ongoing human-forced warming of the globe.

Storm Track Not Making it Far Enough South

NE Pacific Storm, 26 January 2016.
Source: Earth Nullschool vis Robertscribbler.

Particularly, there has been an absence of powerful storms running in over Southern California then surging on into Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas. During strong El Nino events, heat and moisture bleeding off the super-warmed Equator have typically fed powerful storms racing across the Pacific. These storms have tended to engulf the entire US Pacific Coast from San Diego through to Seattle. However, much of the storm energy is often directed further south toward Central and Southern California.

Crossposted with 2016 is strange!

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.

Oil companies getting in a big heap of trouble...

Big Oil and the small oil extraction companies too are getting in a heap of trouble. Big Oil is in scandal over dissassembling the truth over Climate Change while they KNEW the truth, and both Big Oil and the small fry are in trouble over their debts. The latter troubles do not bode well for the oil companies when the supply tightens up again, because of investors issues with the companies' debts that went bad before that point in the future.

Tips o' th' hat to Abel Adamski, Apneaman[1] [2],  Griffin, Ryan in New England, Robert Scribbler [1], [2], dtlange, and Raúl Ilargi Meijer of The Automatic Earth.

Big Oil braced for global warming while it fought regulations
By Amy Lieberman and Susanne Rust of the LA Times
Dec. 31, 2015 Link

“A few weeks before seminal climate change talks in Kyoto back in 1997, Mobil Oil took out a bluntly worded advertisement in the New York Times and Washington Post.

“Let’s face it: The science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil,” the ad said. “Scientists cannot predict with certainty if temperatures will increase, by how much and where changes will occur.”

One year earlier, though, engineers at Mobil Oil were concerned enough about climate change to design and build a collection of exploration and production facilities along the Nova Scotia coast that made structural allowances for rising temperatures and sea levels.

http://graphics.latimes.com/oil-operations/

The problem is it’s not just AGW-Deniers and Republicans. It’s pretty much the entire political apparatus. Congress puts poison pills in must-pass bills and Obama signs off on them. Every. Fracking. Time.

During Paris Climate Summit, Obama Signed Exxon-, Koch-Backed Bill Expediting Pipeline Permits
By Steve Horn of Desmog Blog
December 31, 2015 Link

Just over a week before the U.S. signed the Paris climate agreement at the conclusion of the COP21 United Nations summit, President Barack Obama signed a bill into law with a provision that expedites permitting of oil and gas pipelines in the United States.

The legal and conceptual framework for the fast-tracking provision on pipeline permitting arose during the fight over TransCanada's Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. President Barack Obama initially codified that concept via Executive Order 13604 — signed the same day as he signed an Executive Order to fast-track construction of Keystone XL's southern leg — and this provision “builds on the permit streamlining project launched by” Obama according to corporate law firm Holland & Knight.

That 60-page streamlining provision falls on page 1,141 of the broader 1,301-page FAST (Fixing America's Surface Transportation) Act (H.R. 22 and S. 1647), known in policy wonk circles as the highway bill. The provision is located in a section titled, “Federal Permitting Improvement.”

http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/12/31/paris-climate-summit-obama-exxon-koch-bill-pipeline-permit

And right after, he lifted the export ban. Big Oil didn't take long exploiting it, either. First ship was already on the way on December 31st.

First U.S. Oil Export Leaves Port; Marks End to 40-Year Ban

By Joe Carroll and Sheela Tobben of Bloomberg

31 December 2015 Link

The first U.S. shipment of crude oil to an overseas buyer departed a Texas port on Thursday, just weeks after a 40-year ban on most such exports was lifted.

The Theo T tanker has left NuStar Energy LP’s dockside facility in Corpus Christi, Texas, along the western shore of the Gulf of Mexico, Mary Rose Brown, a spokeswoman for NuStar, said in an e-mail. The ship is carrying a cargo of oil and condensate to Italy from ConocoPhillips’s wells in south Texas that was sold to Swiss trading house Vitol Group.

A campaign by oil explorers including Continental Resources Inc., Chevron Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp. to lift the 1970s-era export prohibition culminated in a Dec. 18 congressional decision to end the ban.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-31/first-u-s-oil-export-leaves-port-marking-end-of-40-year-ban

Well whaddya know! Lots and lots and lots of oil can be materialised into existence using accounting parlor tricks! And then disappeared when the tricks are corrected. The investors and creditors won't won't be happy, tho'.

Billions of Barrels of US Oil Set to Disappear. Poof
Tom Lewis of The Daily Impact Link

In a few weeks, several billion barrels of American oil will vanish in an instant. (I am not making this stuff up: the headline is right there on Bloomberg Business, hardly a chicken-little medium.) This is — shortly to be was — the oil that just a few months ago (Remember? When we were young, and happy?) was to return us to energy independence, to make us the number one oil producer in the world, to bring the happy days here again for good. 

But much of that oil is about to disappear, not with the boom of an oil-train explosion or deep-well blowout or terrorist bomb, but with the quiet click of a computer mouse. And this time it’s not (as it often has been before) the Energy Information Administration revising downward a previous guess about oil reserves.   

As the American shale-oil boom, a.k.a. American Oil Revolution, was accelerating back in 2009, the Masters of the Oil Universe demanded and got an accommodation from the Securities and Exchange Commission: it was made easier for the oil companies to claim as hard assets, for purposes of valuing their companies and borrowing money, the value of all the oil they estimated to be “in reserve,” which is to say lying somewhere under the ground they had under their control.

The oil companies’ estimates of their own “proven reserves” were astronomical, of course. In the careful words of one expert observer, David Hughes, “There was too much optimism built into their forecasts.” Translation: They lied.

http://www.dailyimpact.net/2015/12/10/billions-of-barrels-of-us-oil-set-to-disappear-poof/ 

Richard Heinberg gives a presentation here that focuses on the false promises of fracking, and how since the mid-2000s the major oil companies have invested tens of billions in expanding oil production without hardly any increase in the amount extracted. They are seeing rapidly diminishing returns, and need to maintain production levels. It’s why there is so much fracking and digging up of tar sands and drilling in the deepwater ocean and the Arctic. The low-cost, easy-to-get oil is depleting now but our dependency on oil remains.

Robert Scribbler has this to say about Prof. Heinberg's conclusions:

The old, cheap oil is a diminishing fraction of current production. Growth comes from the expensive unconventional a which is one major reason why we have so many companies facing bankruptcy. From the point of view of strategic use of money to reduce future carbon emissions, now is prime time for divestment. But given a still general lack of strong government policy, the energy markets will face a long series of shocks as a result. Laissez faire again and the result is mass malinvestment in fossil fuels and assets stranded in wave after wave.

 http://robertscribbler.com/2015/12/31/amidst-disasters-around-the-world-top-scientists-declare-links-between-extreme-weather-and-climate-change/#comment-62636

And as the floods come down the Mississippi like a million tractor trailers barreling down the Mass. Pike, Exxon is able to close a refinery to minimize flood damage in Memphis due to lack of demand because of the weird, warm weather we've been having. The weird, warm weather that's being caused by too much Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere due to combustion of fossil fuels, particularly coal and oil.

Southern states brace for surging Mississippi River flooding
By Victoria Cavaliere of Reuters
Additional reporting by Daniel Wallis, Erwin Seba, Justin Madden and Mary Wisniewski
Bernard Orr and Tom Brown, eds.
Fri Jan 1, 2016 Link

Officials in Louisiana are checking levees daily, and Exxon Mobil Corp has decided to shut its 340,571 barrel-per-day refined products terminal in Memphis, Tennessee, as floodwaters threatened to inundate the facility just south of the city’s downtown.

“All that water’s coming south and we have to be ready for it,” Louisiana Lieutenant Governor-Elect Billy Nungesser told CNN. “It’s a serious concern. It’s early in the season. We usually don’t see this until much later.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-weather-idUSKBN0UF1R620160102

And Robert Scribbler finds it "very ironic and more than a little disturbing that the same oil companies that have been shoring up their own infrastructure to deal with climate change keep blocking policies that are now much needed to prevent damage to an undefended public."

Of course, the falling oil prices are going to force oil companies big and small to cut costs any way they can, or face defaults on their debts. We should expect plenty of oil company defauts and bankruptcies in 2016 which could potentially shut-in a lot of oil reserves underground (good news for Climate Change!) due to investors, including big banks, who were once bitten and will be twice shy.

Oil drops 31% in 2015 on global crude glut
By William Watts and Jenny W. Hsu
Dec 31, 2015 Link

Oil futures ended higher Thursday in the final trading session of 2015, but posted a steep annual drop for the second year in a row as markets continue to wrestle with a global glut of crude. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in February rose 44 cents, or 1.2%, to finish at $37.04 a barrel. For the year, the U.S. benchmark dropped 30.5% and has lost 62.4% over the last two years. Crude hadn’t dropped two years in a row since 1998. February Brent crude, the global benchmark, rose 82 cents, or 2.3%, on London’s ICE Futures exchange to settle at $37.28 a barrel. Brent fell 35% in 2015, marking its third straight yearly drop. Oil trimmed gains somewhat after oil-field services firm Baker Hughes said the total number of U.S. oil rigs fell by two this week to 536.

Oil’s bounceback on Thursday likely reflected some short covering ahead of year-end and a three-day weekend, said Phil Flynn at Price Futures. U.S. markets will be closed Friday for the New Year’s Day holiday. Flynn said traders might be nervous about maintaining short positions amid rising tensions within Iran that could threaten the implementation of a nuclear accord that was expected to result in the lifting of sanctions that have prevented the country from exporting oil. Iran’s president has ordered his defense minister to expedite the country’s ballistic missile program following newly planned U.S. sanctions, he said Thursday, according to The Wall Street Journal. With U.S. production “growing for the last few weeks and global inventories being near storage limits, this is yet another reminder that the supply glut could take a long time to clear, which may mean even lower oil prices in the near term,” said Fawad Razaqzad at Forex.com.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/crude-holds-tight-as-dark-clouds-hang-over-prices-for-2016-2015-12-31

Looks like we'll be in interesting times!

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."