Diary Of The Last Age

Research shows that seacoast property is being devalued.  Our government may be denying global warming, but not people who have to put up real money. Homes exposed to sea level rise (SLR) sell at a 7% discount relative to observably equivalent unexposed properties equidistant from the beach. This discount has grown over time and is driven by sophisticated buyers and communities worried about global warming. Consistent with causal identification of long horizon SLR costs, (1) we find no relation between SLR exposure and rental rates, (2) despite decreased remodeling among exposed homeowners, current SLR discounts are not caused by differential investment, (3) results hold controlling for flooded properties and views. Overall, we provide the first evidence on the price of SLR risk and its determinants. These findings contribute to the mixed literature on how investors price long-run risky cash flows and have implications for optimal climate change policy.  This is happe...

Donald Trump is taking the opportunity of the extreme cold weather in the Northeast and Central U.S. to claim it is proof against global warming.  Such a claim is disingenuous .  Due to vagaries in the jet stream, the extreme Arctic weather has moved to Canada and the U.S.  The result is that the Arctic is far warmer than usual.  Near surface temperatures on December 28th as generated by the Climate Reanalyzer online software tool   WMAZ-Macon Meteorologist Matt Daniel summed it up this way, The comment I dislike the most is when people talk about cold weather and people type "So much for global warming..." Not really a joke to me. Also, it proves someone doesn't have the understanding of the definition of weather vs climate. You'll see people type that a lot in the next week or two on professional meteorologists' social media pages. Now having said that, our weather is governed by a series of undulations or wave patterns. The "valleys...

I hope they realize that they have a far greater responsibility for their and our planet's future than I did when I was their age.  When I was their age we worried about the A-bomb and later the Population Bomb .  But neither of those bombs went off because my generation did something about it .   But they're confronted by things a lot more serious.  Thirty years from now there'll be 9.7 billion people on the planet, a much more serious problem than the population bomb that the green revolution prevented.  Do we know what is going to solve the problem of 9.7 billion people when my grandchildren are in their forties?  We don't.  And what about global warming?  Rising sea levels inundating coastal cities.   Extreme weather battering Asia and Eastern U.S., droughts in the midwest and southwest. Millions of climate refugees migrating north.  There is no one dealing with these issues right now.  I'll be gone soon (I'm 75), bu...

I've posted before about the dangers of melting permafrost .  As the Arctic climate warms, permafrost melts and releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere further warming the atmosphere.  It's called a negative feedback cycle . There is now another feedback route adding to it accelerating the negative feedback even more.    Even as climate change shrinks some populations of arctic animals like polar bears and caribou, beavers may be taking advantage of warming temperatures to expand their range. But as the beavers head north, their very presence may worsen the effects of climate change. Take the dams they build on rivers and streams to slow the flow of water and create the pools in which they construct their dens. In other habitats, where the dams help filter pollutants from water and mitigate the effects of droughts and floods, they are generally seen as a net benefit . But in the tundra, the vast treeless region in the Far North, beaver behavior creates new ...

There's no question our climate change situation is becoming desperate.   The most accurate models predict 5 degrees Celsius at the end of this century if we do nothing.  That's end of civilization.  But now we have something happening , just the kind of thing that we need to avert the worst.  It exactly the kind of thing we need to happen.  The discovery means that nanoscale generators have the potential to harvest power for electrical devices based on nanoscale movement and vibration: an engine, traffic on a roadway—even a heartbeat. It could lead to technology with applications in everything from sensors used to monitor the physical strength of structures such as bridges or pipelines, the performance of engines or wearable electronic devices.   Liu said the applications are limited only by imagination. We won't even need wind or solar power.  Electricity will be everywhere.  And everything will be running on electricity.  No fossil...