Tomorrow * NO Cars – What then

If Schumer could pull this off I would be “dancin in the streets”. It would not be as good and banning Airline Flights, but heh I will take whatever I can get. It would be really good for the lower level atmosphere and especially good for bodies of water, whether flowing bodies like rivers or standing bodies like lakes or oceans. Unfortunately, the upper atmosphere is where the real global warming is taking place. Still – I am not minimizing this. IT be good.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/17/22334634/schumer-electric-vehicle-swap-discount-infrastructure-interview

Chuck Schumer wants to replace every gas car in America with an electric vehicle

The Senate majority leader is reviving his plan to give people discounts for swapping their gas car for an electric one

With the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill signed into law, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is ready to tackle the next major challenge: President Joe Biden’s call for a massive infrastructure bill. As part of that package, Schumer said he plans to include his ambitious proposal to get every American to swap their gas-guzzling car for an electric one.

“It’s a bold new plan designed to accelerate America’s transition to all electric vehicles on the road, to developing a charging infrastructure, and to grow American jobs through clean manufacturing,” Schumer told The Verge in a brief interview this week. “And the ultimate goal is to have every car manufactured in America be electric by 2030, and every car on the road be clean by 2040.”

The top-line details of the “cash for clunkers’’-style plan haven’t changed much since Schumer first proposed it in an op-ed in The New York Times in late 2019. But the political landscape has certainly shifted in favor of the Democrats, breathing new life into the idea. Under the proposal, anyone who trades in their gas car for an electric one would get a “substantial” point-of-sale discount, Schumer says. He wouldn’t say how much of a discount, only that it would be “deep.” A spokesperson later confirmed they are eyeing rebates that are “more generous” than the current $7,500 federal EV tax credit.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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When The World Stops – We all get OFF

When the atmosphere is so gunked up and the ocean so full of crap then the currents both in the atmosphere and the ocean slow down and eventually stop. At that point we all die. End game. Checkmate. But here I’ll let these people tell you in more technical language. I am sure if you don’t believe me, you will believe them.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/atlantic-currents-seem-to-have-started-fading-last-century/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

In deep —

Atlantic currents seem to have started fading last century

Another predicted impact of climate change may be here.

The major currents in the Atlantic Ocean help control the climate by moving warm surface waters north and south from the equator, with colder deep water pushing back toward the equator from the poles. The presence of that warm surface water plays a key role in moderating the climate in the North Atlantic, giving places like the UK a far more moderate climate than its location—the equivalent of northern Ontario—would otherwise dictate.

But the temperature differences that drive that flow are expected to fade as our climate continues to warm. A bit over a decade ago, measurements of the currents seemed to be indicating that temperatures were dropping, suggesting that we might be seeing these predictions come to pass. But a few years later, it became clear that there was just too much year-to-year variation for us to tell.

Over time, however, researchers have figured out ways of getting indirect measures of the currents, using material that is influenced by the strengths of the water’s flow. These measures have now let us look back on the current’s behavior over the past several centuries. And the results confirm that the strength of the currents has dropped dramatically over the last century.

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Go there and read some. If there is one, More next week.

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Glacier Breaks Dam – In India, what more can I say

Yes right now the United States has some serious examples of Global Warming. California’s a mess. Let’s see: Massive fires, Massive floods, Massive mud slides and smog. Hotter weather, Melting ice. Then there are the hurricanes.

But this a falling Glacier that destroys a Dam. It killed 100s. That is a serious difference in orders of magnitude.

https://news.sky.com/story/northern-india-150-feared-dead-as-glacier-breaks-and-hits-dam-in-12211408

Northern India: At least 26 dead and 165 missing as glacier breaks and hits dam

A portion of a Himalayan glacier broke off causing a wall of water and debris to hit two hydroelectric projects in Uttarakhand.

At least 26 people have died and 165 others are missing in northern India after part of a Himalayan glacier broke off, sending a wall of water and debris into two hydroelectric dams.

More than 2,000 members of the military, paramilitary groups and police are carrying out search-and-rescue missions after Sunday’s incident in the state of Uttarakhand.

The deluge destroyed one dam, damaged another and washed homes away downstream.

The focus of teams’ efforts was on saving 37 workers trapped inside a tunnel at the Dhauliganga project, one of the affected hydropower plants, officials said.

A portion of Nanda Devi glacier broke off in the Tapovan area of Uttarakhand state on Sunday, with the subsequent flooding damaging the Rishiganga and Dhauliganga hydropower projects, officials said.

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Go there and shriek. More next week.

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Climate Change – Why no one believes it

Everyone wants to believe but they can’t. The bigger it gets, the less they believe. No one can really get their heads around how big the problem is. The solutions are even LARGER.

According to this article, even though people’s minds are changing their hearts are not. That is a big bummer.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-climate-crisis-is-worse-than-you-can-imagine-heres-what-happens-if-you-try?utm_source=pocket-newtab

(sorry for starting in the middle of the article, but it makes my point here)

Sometimes everything is both too much and not enough. George Marshall opened his book, “Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change,” with the parable of Jan Karski, a young Polish resistance fighter who, in 1943, met in person with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was both a Jew and widely regarded as one of the great minds of his generation. Karski briefed the justice on what he’d seen firsthand: the pillage of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Belzec death camp. Afterward, Frankfurter said, “I do not believe you.”

The Polish ambassador, who had arranged the meeting on the recommendation of President Franklin Roosevelt, interrupted to defend Karski’s account.

“I did not say that he is lying,” Frankfurter explained. “I said that I didn’t believe him. It’s a different thing. My mind, my heart — they are made in such a way that I cannot accept. No no no.”

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Go there and meditate er…read. More next week.

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We Are About To Unthaw Pandora’s Box – Do you like the spread of Human Killers

Well now it is here. Permafrost covers 24% of the Earth’s surface. It is melting at a quickening pace. Buried in this permafrost are many Dead Bodies. Dead Human’s that carry ancient diseases that we have no defense against. Not just Human bodies but animal bodies and maybe Dinosaur bodies. Who knows what diseases they might contain? What if we had not just one virus to deal with (like now) but several and we had no time for a vaccine? That does not take into account the bacterium and other microbes that may have been harmless in their day, but cause Humans to turn deaf, or blind, or mute?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deep-frozen-arctic-microbes-are-waking-up/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Climate | Opinion

Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up

Thawing permafrost is releasing microorganisms, with consequences that are still largely unknown

By Kimberley R. Miner, Arwyn Edwards, Charles Miller on

In August 2019, Iceland held a funeral for the Okjökull Glacier, the first Icelandic glacier lost to climate change. The community commemorated the event with a plaque in recognition of this irreversible change and the grave impacts it represents. Globally, glacier melt rates have nearly doubled in the last five years, with an average loss of 832 mmw.e. (millimeters water equivalent) in 2015, increasing to 1,243 mmw.e. in 2020 (WGMS). This high rate of loss decreases glacial stores of freshwater and changes the structure of the surrounding ecosystem.

In the last 10 years, warming in the Arctic has outpaced projections so rapidly that scientists are now suggesting that the poles are warming four times faster than the rest of the globe. This has led to glacier melt and permafrost thaw levels that weren’t forecast to happen until 2050 or later. In Siberia and northern Canada, this abrupt thaw has created sunken landforms, known as thermokarst, where the oldest and deepest permafrost is exposed to the warm air for the first time in hundreds or even thousands of years.

As the global climate continues to warm, many questions remain about the periglacial environment. Among them: as water infiltration increases, will permafrost thaw more rapidly? And, if so, what long-frozen organisms might “wake up”?

Permafrost covers 24 percent of the Earth’s land surface, and the soil constituents vary with local geology. Arctic lands offer unexplored microbial biodiversity and microbial feedbacks, including the release of carbon to the atmosphere. In some locations, hundreds of millions of years’ worth of carbon is buried. The layers may still contain ancient frozen microbes, Pleistocene megafauna and even buried smallpox victims. As the permafrost thaws with increasing rapidity, scientists’ emerging challenge is to discover and identify the microbes, bacteria and viruses that may be stirring.

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Go there and get grossed out. More next week.

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Want To See What Climate Change Does To America – You really don’t but you will go look anyway

As you scroll through this article it shows how climate change effects America. I must say it is pretty cool in a technological way, but it is depressing for an environmentalist like me. Illinois fares OK until about 2070. Just in case you are interested.

https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/?utm_source=digg

New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

According to new data from the Rhodium Group analyzed by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, warming temperatures and changing rainfall will drive agriculture and temperate climates northward, while sea level rise will consume coastlines and dangerous levels of humidity will swamp the Mississippi River valley.

Taken with other recent research showing that the most habitable climate in North America will shift northward and the incidence of large fires will increase across the country, this suggests that the climate crisis will profoundly interrupt the way we live and farm in the United States. See how the North American places where humans have lived for thousands of years will shift and what changes are in store for your county.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers modeled the human climate “niche”: the regions where temperature and precipitation have been most suitable for humans to live in over the past 6,000 years.

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Go there and read. Go there and play. More next week.

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Attached To An Ice Floe In The Arctic – What a brave way to study Global Warming

So who are you going to believe? A research vessel attached to Arctic ice or a weasel attached to the Presidency with Leech like suckers.  ie. Trump – it’s a hoax or Science – it’s COMING! Me I trust science. Not Russian science either.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/scientists-made-an-alarmingly-easy-trip-to-the-north-po-1844858358?utm_source=digg

Scientists Made an Alarmingly Easy Trip to the North Pole

 

dharnanoor

Filed to:ice ice maybe

 

At Earther, we’ve been following the historic extent of ice melt in the Arctic this summer pretty closely. But not as closely as Gunnar Spreen and his research team, who are literally following the ice.

“We’re attached to an ice floe now,” he said on the phone from a research vessel called the Polarstern, which is currently at the latitude 88 degrees north, just under 150 miles (230 kilometers) from the North Pole. “We’re drifting with the ice. Wherever it goes, we go.”

Spreen, a sea ice and remote sensing scientist at the University of Bremen, is taking part in a research expedition known as the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate, or MOSAiC. It’s the largest Arctic research campaign in history, with some 500 scientists and staffers rotating on and off of the research vessel for months at a time.

The current cohort boarded the Polarstern on August 12, and in just a week’s time, they made it to the North Pole. To get there, they took an unexpected route, north of Greenland.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Michael Sellenberger Is A Lying Fool – He is a huge supporter of Nuclear Power

As one of the commenters on Peak Oil said, “yah and smoking cures cancer”. Or as another said. ” a deniers denier, whose paying him”? His editorial is so wrong in so many ways. Yes, we ARE causing the next big extinction by habitat destruction and this pandemic is a perfect result of that habitat destruction and it’s results. Global warming IS the biggest crisis facing humans. Its true – not the biggest crisis facing the Earth cause after we are gone and all the smoke gets reabsorbed the Earth will be just fine. This guy is raising money by spreading feel good skepticism (and that’s all it is) and making himself famous by telling lies.

https://environmentalprogress.org/who-we-are

On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare

The author in Maranhão, Brazil, 1995

The author in Maranhão, Brazil, 1995

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

  • Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”

  • The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”

  • Climate change is not making natural disasters worse

  • Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003

  • The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska

  • The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

  • Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s

  • Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level

  • We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter

  • Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change

  • Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels

  • Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

 

 

 

 

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I Am So Excited To Be Posting On Earth Day – The 50th Anniversary

That’s it. That’s all I can say. Well you know me, that’s not all I can say. Like the National Geographic Magazine says, they are divided about the results. We have accomplished alot but never enough because the root cause of climate change is evil greed, better known as capitalism. As long as we practice those economics, we will continue down the drain. The drain that looks like this:

https://newrepublic.com/article/157078/climate-crisis-will-just-shockingly-abrupt?utm_source=digg

The Climate Crisis Will Be Just as Shockingly Abrupt

The coronavirus isn’t a reason to put climate policy on hold. It’s a warning of the calamities ahead.

As governments around the globe debate how to respond both to the coronavirus itself and the economic chaos it has unleashed, a theme that’s come up over and over is how to prioritize what makes it into spending packages. In the United States, right-left fault lines have emerged over the question of bailing out emissions-heavy industries versus a greener stimulus. On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a large-scale rollback of environmental regulations as a response to the pandemic—allowing many emitters to police themselves when it comes to pollution.

While some argue that the oxygen in the climate debate should be taken up by the pandemic instead, the two issues aren’t mutually exclusive, experts say. In a warming climate, more diseases are likely to emerge and spread, making climate change action an important part of addressing future health crises. Moreover, the perception that climate change isn’t as urgent as other crises may rely on misunderstandings about how climate-related changes will happen. The rate isn’t constant: Instead, there’s reason to believe everything from Arctic melt to Amazon deforestation might experience what’s known as “tipping points,” where small changes in nature shift into rapid and irreversible damage.

Greenland and Antarctica are melting six times faster than they were in the 1990s, according to a new study in the journal Nature. Between 1992 and 2017, Greenland and Antarctica lost 6.4 trillion tons of ice. This falls under the worst-case scenario projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the effects are already being felt in many parts of the world. The IPCC predicts that by the end of the century, 400 million people around the globe could be at risk of coastal flooding every year from sea-level rise alone.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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I Am Not Having Kids – Some people get way to carried away with environment issues

There are people that live their lives to right environmental wrongs. Then there are people who live their lives according environmental principles. Sometimes the two meet in a happy medium. Then there are people who over do it. To those people I say stop. (no exclamation mark) Don’t be vegetarian to “save the planet”. It will not. Don’t have children to make the “world a better place”. It will not. Do those things if they make you feel good and you will have a better life. But if you want to have 3 kids- and you can love them and afford them,  then do that thing.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/13/21132013/climate-change-children-kids-anti-natalism

Having fewer kids will not save the climate

Some say you shouldn’t have children in the era of climate change. Don’t buy it.

A growing contingent of young people are refusing to have kids — or are considering having fewer kids — because of climate change. Their voices have been growing louder over the past year. UK women set up a movement called BirthStrike, announcing that they won’t procreate until the world gets its act together on climate, and high-profile US figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez amplified the question of whether childbearing is still morally acceptable.

One of the main worries cited by this contingent is that having a child will make climate change worse. Their logic is that anytime you have a kid you’re doing something bad for the planet. You’re adding yet another person who’ll cause more carbon emissions, plus their children, plus their grandchildren … and so on, in a never-ending cascade of procreative shame.

Driving this logic are studies claiming to show that having a child leads to a gargantuan amount of carbon emissions — way, way more than the emissions generated by other lifestyle choices, like driving a car or eating meat. Media reports have trumpeted the takeaway that if you want to fight climate change, having fewer children is far and away the best thing you can do.

But that’s just not true, according to a new report by Founders Pledge, an organization that guides entrepreneurs committed to donating a portion of their proceeds to effective charities.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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