Diary Of The Last Age

Moved to here .

We're experiencing many climate change related extreme weather events such as record drought followed by record rain in California .  These events, while extreme, do not seem to be moving the needle on attitudes toward global warming, especially not Congress and the new President and the people he's appointed to Federal offices. I continue to believe what I've stated numerous times in the past, that it will be the rise in sea level that is going to get everyone's attention. But that attention will come long before Miami and New Orleans are actually underwater .  This is how it will look like, Coastal Cities Could Flood Three Times a Week by 2045 The lawns of homes purchased this year in vast swaths of coastal America could regularly be underwater before the mortgage has even been paid off, with new research showing high tide flooding could become nearly incessant in places within 30 years. Such floods could occur several times a week on average by 2045 a...

Republicans are calling for a carbon tax . A group of Republican elder statesmen is calling for a tax on carbon emissions to fight climate change .  The group, led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, with former Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Henry M. Paulson Jr., a former secretary of the Treasury, says that taxing carbon pollution produced by burning fossil fuels is “a conservative climate solution” based on free-market principles. It would be a neutral tax, that is, the funds collected would be disbursed among American families.   The tax would be collected where the fossil fuels enter the economy, such as the mine, well or port; the money raised would be returned to consumers in what the group calls a “carbon dividend” amounting to an estimated $2,000 a year for the average family of four. This is a description of their plan: First, the federal government would impose a gradually increasing tax on carbon dioxide emissions. It might begin at...

Sabrina Tavernise in an op-ed at the New York Times makes a good point, that the current partisan divide can be explained as tribal: Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, calls it the clash between globalists and nationalists. The globalists, who tend to be urban and college educated, want a world like the one described in John Lennon’s song “Imagine” — no religion, walls or borders dividing people. The nationalists see that as a vision of hell. They want to defend their culture and emphasize the bonds of nationhood — flag, Constitution, patriotism. They also want to limit immigration, an instinct that globalists are often quick to condemn as racist. This seems right to me, but as a person who regards global warming as the greatest looming threat to human civilization, I wonder why this divides us on global warming, but it does. For example, Doug Palen, a Midwest farmer who lives in a State populated by members of the nationalist tribe, and a fourth-g...

Climate scientists generally believe that if we keep the increase in the global atmospheric temperature below 2°C (3.6°F) , we would avoid the most serious consequences.  The increase has to be measured from some baseline.   Scientists have recently looked that baseline, A study just out  in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society tackles this question head on. In this article, lead author  Dr. Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading  and an international team of colleagues take into account many climate records that date back decades and centuries. Based on their analysis, they determined that the period 1720-1800 is the best selection for “pre-industrial.”  [....] Using three different analysis methods, the authors are able to conclude that from their pre-industrial time to the 1986-2005 period, there was a likely global temperature increase of 0.55–0.80°C (1–1.4°F).   What this means is that we passed the 1°C (1.8°F) level...

Oil's dark secret   --   Government-owned firms control most of the world's oil reserves. Name the biggest oil company in the world. ExxonMobil? British Petroleum? Royal Dutch Shell? In fact, the 13 largest energy companies on Earth, measured by the reserves they control, are now owned and operated by governments. Saudi Aramco, Gazprom (Russia), China National Petroleum Corp., National Iranian Oil Co., Petróleos de Venezuela, Petrobras (Brazil) and Petronas (Malaysia) are all larger than ExxonMobil, the largest of the multinationals. Collectively, multinational oil companies produce just 10% of the world's oil and gas reserves. State-owned companies now control more than 75% of all crude oil production.... Another country has joined this club, With a Major Offshore Discovery, Guyana Is Poised to Become a Top Energy Producer What this all means is that it is going to be very difficult to get the cooperation of these countries for the fight against global warming bec...

My initial start on global warming was due to the work of climate scientists in the 90's.  But one event had a very large impression on me, the Paleocene/Eocene Boundary Thermal Maximum.  At this time 56 million years ago, methane and carbon dioxide bubbled up out of the ocean dramatically increasing atmospheric temperature and acidifying the oceans producing the largest loss of sea life in the history of the planet.  One striking feature of this time was dramatic warming of the Arctic where daytime summer temperatures reached 75 degrees Fahrenheit.  The climate was tropical as far north as Oregon. It was another 200,000 years before the planet completely recovered from this.  But the most frightening thing is that we are pouring 10 times the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than what happened then.  And look what is happening to the Arctic. Spiking Temperatures in the Arctic Startle Scientists In mid-November, parts of the Arctic were more than...