Diary Of The Last Age

I've posted  before , a  lot ,  here  and  here , that a carbon tax must happen if we are to stop the flow of CO2 into the atmosphere and our oceans.  Now there's a new strategy that might be successful, suing the oil companies.   San Francisco has started it , and  Oakland and other California cities are joining in . The two Californian cities join the counties of Marin, San Mateo and San Diego and the city of Imperial Beach that have taken similar legal action in recent months, the  San Francisco Chronicle  reports. San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera and Oakland city attorney Barbara J. Parker filed separate lawsuits on Tuesday in the superior courts of San Francisco and Alameda County on behalf of their respective cities.  They seek to hold the companies responsible “for the costs of sea walls and other infrastructure necessary to protect San Francisco and Oakland from ongoing and future consequences of cl...

Moved to here .

Much of the CO2 we're pouring into the atmosphere ends up being absorbed in our ocean.  Actually most of it.  And this has terrible  implications  for sea life.  It has happened before.  At the  Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum  we had the greatest extinction of sea life in the history of the planet. And this was the result of CO2 and methane being pumped into the atmosphere and thus the oceans.  And what we're doing now is ten times what happened then. What we can expect is the loss of much of our sea life.  Except for one, the jelly fish.  Jelly fish will thrive under these conditions.  Interestingly jellyfish will have  no problem,  and may even become a  main food source. And  they're coming to terms with this in Italy. While tourists throughout Europe seek out Apulia, in Italy’s southeast, for its Baroque whitewashed cities and crystalline seas, swarms of jellyfish are also thronging to its waters. ...

I've  posted  many times  before  about  sea level rise  as being the opening consequence of climate change.  But now we have something else to worry about that's happening right now,  disease carrying mosquitoes . The Aedes aegypti mosquito, which spreads Zika, dengue and chikungunya, has been turning up places where it had rarely or never been seen.  Credit  Marvin Recinos/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images         A mounting number of citations on a popular disease-tracking website suggests that mosquitoes may be moving into new ecological niches with greater frequency.  The website,  ProMED mail , has carried more than a dozen such reports since June, all involving mosquito species known to transmit human diseases.  Most reports have concerned the United States, where, for example, Aedes aegypti — the yellow fever mosquito, which also spreads Zika, dengue and chikungunya — has been turni...

What Climate Scientists Want You to See in the Floodwaters Like most Americans this week, we have been transfixed by the still unfolding disaster in Houston and coastal Texas, described on the airwaves as “unprecedented” and “beyond anything experienced.”  If that wasn’t bad enough, on the other side of the globe, another climate-related calamity has been unfolding, though it has received less attention: the ongoing monsoon flooding in India, Bangladesh and Nepal that has killed more than 1,000 people and displaced millions . As in Houston, recovery there will take years. Climate change doesn’t cause extreme events. It amplifies them. What we have to look forward to, is more and more amplification of weather events.  Global warming is increasing the amount of moisture in the atmosphere.  And what we have to look forward too is a decreasing ability for our handling these disasters -- there will be too many of them.  In the not to distant future, there will ...