Climate Denial Crock of the Week

If governments do not enact broad pricing on carbon – an increasingly aroused population will begin (already have begun..) to create their own barriers to suicidal policies – a people’s carbon tax.

OK, your Aunt Polly is not going to sit thru a full lecture from Kevin Trenberth.(see that below on this page)
But here’s an under-four-minute snapshot from Katharine Hayhoe, delivered on Earth day to a group students.
Elegant, simple and informative. Communicators, take notes.

H/T to reader Evan Whitby.

Grab some coffee.
Good discussion of current El Nino from just a few months ago – what better source for an update than one of the most respected atmospheric scientists of this generation?

Description:
Dr. Hovind talks about Bill Nye wanting to “jail Climate Change Deniers” who won’t obey science showing the earth’s climate is changing… Bill Nye is openly admitting he is an authoritarian with such inflammatory comments. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin would be proud of Bill Nye the Science Guy.

If Stupid were Against the Law…..

Oil Giant Exxon-Mobil, and some organizations that have received Exxon funding, are under investigation by several State Attorneys General, following revelations that Exxon scientists understood and warned management of the consequences of continued carbon release, as long ago as the 1960s.   The Attorneys General are asking if Exxon’s massive disinformation campaign on climate amounted to lying and deceiving its investors.

The company’s defense strategy is borrowed from Tobacco industry – it claims that disseminating misleading and distorted information and poisoning a national conversation was part of exercising its “Right of Free Speech”.

The meme is getting uptake among the usual target audience.  I love it when cartoon stereotypes come to life. Read the rest of this entry »

Was looking for an excuse to post this video, and found it.

If you haven’t seen, it’s the 2004 induction of George Harrison into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, with an all star band playing the classic “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.

Tom Petty & Co do a great version of the song, but what makes it is the last part, where Prince steps up and burns down the stage.

Mother Nature Network:

“He thought it was in poor taste for these celebrities to get millions of dollars and then write a check and have their publicists all over the media bragging about it. He was like, ‘This is ridiculous. We get enough attention. We’re celebrities.’”

That’s environmental activist Van Jones talking about Prince with The Guardian. While there’s been much talk about The Purple One’s legacy on music, film and the arts, what was less well known — until his untimely death at least — was that Prince was also a rock star in the worlds of social justice, environmental activism and philanthropy.

In the case of Jones, for example, their relationship began when Prince tried to give him a $50,000 check to support his work with Green For All, an environmental justice organization working on everything from clean energy jobs for inner city youth to insuring a safe drinking supply. Jones was initially skeptical, refusing to accept anonymous checks because he was concerned that they might compromise the organization’s values. The two eventually connected, however, and with Jones’ help, Prince was able to fund the installation of solar panels for families in inner city Oakland — yet those families never knew who had funded it.

Working on a new climate solutions vid, using the interview that Jim Byrne and I conducted with Mark Jacobson in December.

Jacobson is one of the most well known researchers in the area of renewable energy, and how states, cities, and countries can transition to zero carbon energy in the near term.
His take on natural gas as the “bridge to the future” is quick, and sobering.

ClimateProgress:

The body of evidence is growing that fracking is not only bad for the global climate, it is also dangerous for local communities.

And affected communities are growing in number. A new report, released Thursday, details the sheer amount of water contamination, air pollution, climate impacts, and chemical use in fracking in the United States.

“For the past decade, fracking has been a nightmare for our drinking water, our open spaces, and our climate,” Rachel Richardson, a co-author of the paper from Environment America, told ThinkProgress.

Fracking, a form of extraction that injects large volumes of chemical-laced water into shale, releasing pockets of oil and gas, has been on the rise in the United States for the past decade, and the sheer numbers are staggering. Environment America reports that at least 239 billion gallons of water — an average of three million gallons per well — has been used for fracking. In 2014 alone, fracking created 15 billion gallons of wastewater. This water generally cannot be reused, and is often toxic. Fracking operators reinject the water underground, where it can leach into drinking water sources. The chemicals can include formaldehyde, benzene, and hydrochloric acid.

Fracking is also bad news for the climate. Natural gas is 80 percent methane, which traps heat 86 times more effectively than CO2 over a 20-year period. Newly fracked wells released 2.4 million metric tons of methane in 2014 — equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 22 coal-fired power plants.

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Here, Zeke Hausfather on how global temperatures have been measured.

New study profiles decreasing oxygen levels in oceans.

Above, scientists tell us about what’s happened in Earth’s deep past  when the process went to extremes.

Washington Post:

The oceans are getting warmer — they are, after all, where 90 percent of global warming actually ends up. And when they warm up they expand, because that’s what warm water does. This raises our sea levels, but it also has another effect — it reduces the amount of oxygen dissolved in the water. That’s simply physics: Warmer water contains less oxygen.

Read the rest of this entry »