It Tolls for Thee: Climate Impacts Hitting Wealthy Nations Hard
July 18, 2021
Maybe you thought climate action would be a nice thing to do, but that there was no realistic chance that global warming would affect you any time soon?
A Thousand people missing in Germany. US West shrouded in smoke and a withering heat dome, as a historic mega drought emerges. (watch for new video soon)
Is anyone doing a rethink?
Some of Europe’s richest countries lay in disarray this weekend, as raging rivers burst through their banks in Germany and Belgium, submerging towns, slamming parked cars against trees and leaving Europeans shellshocked at the intensity of the destruction.
Only days before in the Northwestern United States, a region famed for its cool, foggy weather, hundreds had died of heat. In Canada, wildfire had burned a village off the map. Moscow reeled from record temperatures. And this weekend the northern Rocky Mountains were bracing for yet another heat wave, as wildfires spread across 12 states in the American West.
The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it. The week’s events have now ravaged some of the world’s wealthiest nations, whose affluence has been enabled by more than a century of burning coal, oil and gas — activities that pumped the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are warming the world.
“I say this as a German: The idea that you could possibly die from weather is completely alien,” said Friederike Otto, a physicist at Oxford University who studies the links between extreme weather and climate change. “There’s not even a realization that adaptation is something we have to do right now. We have to save people’s lives.”
The floods in Europe have killed at least 165 people, most of them in Germany, Europe’s most powerful economy. Across Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, hundreds have been reported as missing, which suggests the death toll could rise. Questions are now being raised about whether the authorities adequately warned the public about risks.
Disasters magnified by global warming have left a long trail of death and loss across much of the developing world, after all, wiping out crops in Bangladesh, leveling villages in Honduras, and threatening the very existence of small island nations. Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines in the run-up to climate talks in 2013, which prompted developing-country representatives to press for funding to deal with loss and damage they face over time for climate induced disasters that they weren’t responsible for. That was rejected by richer countries, including the United States and Europe.
“Extreme weather events in developing countries often cause great death and destruction — but these are seen as our responsibility, not something made worse by more than a hundred years of greenhouse gases emitted by industrialized countries,” said Ulka Kelkar, climate director at the India office of the World Resources Institute. These intensifying disasters now striking richer countries, she said, show that developing countries seeking the world’s help to fight climate change “have not been crying wolf.”
The ferocity of these disasters is as notable as their timing, coming ahead of the global talks in Glasgow to try to reach agreement on fighting climate change. The world has a poor track record on cooperation so far, and, this month, new diplomatic tensions emerged.
Among major economies, the European Commission last week introduced the most ambitious road map for change. It proposed laws to ban the sale of gas and diesel cars by 2035, require most industries to pay for the emissions they produce, and most significantly, impose a tax on imports from countries with less stringent climate policies.
But those proposals are widely expected to meet vigorous objections both from within Europe and from other countries whose businesses could be threatened by the proposed carbon border tax, potentially further complicating the prospects for global cooperation in Glasgow.
The events of this summer come after decades of neglect of science. Climate models have warned of the ruinous impact of rising temperatures. An exhaustive scientific assessment in 2018 warned that a failure to keep the average global temperature from rising past 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to the start of the industrial age, could usher in catastrophic results, from the inundation of coastal cities to crop failures in various parts of the world.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
July 18, 2021 at 11:51 am
Video unavailable
The uploader has not made this video available in your country.
July 18, 2021 at 4:35 pm
Same here but I installed a free VPN and it come through fine.
July 18, 2021 at 11:52 am
I feel sorry for that but the wealthy are more responsible to climate change.
July 19, 2021 at 1:08 am
From EuroStat:
Well, Germany has shut down their last black (hard) coal mine, but they’re still mining nasty brown lignite, and their target for shutting down all of their coal power plants by 2038.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-18/australia-climate-how-germany-is-closing-down-its-coal-industry/11902884
I believe their Saar and Ruhr coal districts are near where some of the major flooding is.
July 19, 2021 at 2:41 am
Thank you.
July 19, 2021 at 5:11 am
‘But Germany has arguably gone further than most countries in its response to climate change.’
Germany is planning to close its last six nuclear reactors within a year. Last year they made 11% of the county’s power, with associated emissions, according to the IPCC, on a par with wind. Twelve years ago, they had 20 GW making about a quarter of it. Most of the 200 billion Euro they’ve since spent on wind and solar has just gone into replacing the 12 GW they’ve already shut.
At the moment, Germany’s ‘Strom’ has average associated emissions of 280 grams CO2/kwh – and that’s with solar cranking near the midday peak. France’s figure is 54g, but for most of today it was below 30g.
https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE?wind=false&solar=false
Not content with that, Germany has been leading a group of EU countries intent on making sure that nuclear is not counted in the ‘taxonomy’ of favoured technologies that get funding and favourable legislation. The five ‘anti’ countries also include Spain, Austria, Luxembourg, and Denmark. All have much higher power emissions than France.
Germany also pressured France for years to close the two reactors at Fessenheim, near the Rhine. They were finally closed a year ago – about five years after getting a two billion Euro upgrade, making them effectively the most modern units in the French fleet.
July 19, 2021 at 12:44 pm
They might be reconsidering things (prematurely shutting down the nukes, sticking with coal until 2038) after this little rain-bomb wake-up call.
July 19, 2021 at 11:02 pm
The problem, of course, is not that Germany isn’t closing nukes down, which after all is the only rational act.
The problem is that they’re not ditching fossil fuels fast enough and replacing them with efficiency, wiser lives, and clean safe renewable energy, just like every other country in the world (with the possible exceptions of Norway and Iceland and somewhat Sweden and Denmark)
This is an emergency many times more dire and urgent than the rise of European and Asian fascism in the mid-20th century. The future of the world depends on what we do in the next 9 years, and every government and oligarch in the world, even those 4, are looking at it only as a challenge to their power and privilege. (Corporations are even worse, and religions have abdicated entirely.)
In Germany, as in the US, China, India, Britain, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, the problem is that people and governments are allowing oligarchs, especially fossil fuel owners and right wing lunatics, to keep enough power to slow or stop progress toward survival. It’s unforgivable. As is the trolls behavior in slowing the takeover of clean safe renewables because of their addictions and bigmanlymachine bias. Those are indicative of deeper psychological problems but those afflicted refuse to look at themselves with courage and honesty. Thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
July 20, 2021 at 6:50 am
J4Zonian Says: “Thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” What is that unparalleled catastrophe that the world is drifting toward if you are not listened to and what you babble on about is not heeded?
This lifting people out of poverty was accomplished on the back of fossil fuels. If the climate alarmist had their way, the trend would be reversed and more people would be living in destitution and sorrow.
“One of the most remarkable feats in the world has been the lifting of about a billion people out of abject poverty in the past couple of decades. If the industrialisation trend continues, then this century could witness some of the rapid improvements in living standards seen in the West during the 19th Century. […] The prize, which many will hope is in reach, is that global poverty is eliminated entirely within another couple of decades. It is the reason why the Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas said that once you start thinking about economic growth and the improvements in standards of living, it is hard to stop.” http://www.bbc.com/news/business-22956470
July 21, 2021 at 1:58 pm
Swallows,
You’ve made your point, although it’s hardly the point you meant to make. You’ve lied with every statement, revealed every argument as bankrupt and every authority you cite as corrupt (as if we didn’t know that already). You support those who are trying to destroy civilization and most life on Earth, and you’re furthering the crisis that—listen to this, you pathological amoral moron—obviously exists whether people like you listen or not. It will destroy almost everything people who can feel something love. Maybe you know some of them.
Whatever your bizarre purpose in coming here—which you clearly understand least of all of us—you should go away now, and come back if you ever recover from the mental illness that’s making you do this. If it happens in time, we’ll do our best to forgive you.
July 20, 2021 at 4:49 am
It appears that since Germany is crippling its electrical system by trying to incorporate near useless wind and solar into it, it is making the price of electricity about the highest in the world.
Electricity prices for households, March 2019
(kWh, U.S. Dollar);
India and China’s electricity cost .08 U.S. Dollar per kWh
USA has a cost of .15 U.S. Dollar per kWh
Denmark has a cost of .34 U.S. Dollar per kWh
Germany has a cost of .35 U.S. Dollar per kWh
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
Please notice the correlation of cost and who uses coal.
The % of electricity produced by coal in India
India 2015 75.3%
The % of electricity produced by coal in China
China 2015 70.3%
The % of electricity produced by coal in Denmark
Denmark 2015 24.5%
The % of electricity produced by coal in Germany
Germany 2015 44.3%
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.COAL.ZS
July 20, 2021 at 4:53 am
From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.
Click to access the-utter-complete-total-fraud-of-wind-power.pdf
July 23, 2021 at 4:14 pm
[Couldn’t read that PDF inline. Found URL at
https://www.ranken-energy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/the-utter-complete-total-fraud-of-wind-power.pdfThere’s a fine of 200 quatloos for that article about a rapidly growing industry not having a date on it. ]
I couldn’t find the bit in that report on the site of Ranken Energy, the oil and gas exploration and production company, where they revealed how much money has been spent by FF companies trying to (1) undermine acceptance of AGW and (2) undermine development of the wind and solar industry.
Funny about that.
Can you explain it?
July 20, 2021 at 6:52 am
“Germany’s Energy Poverty: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good” September 04, 2013
“Altmaier and others are on a mission to help people save money on their electricity bills, because they’re about to receive some bad news. The government predicts that the renewable energy surcharge added to every consumer’s electricity bill will increase from 5.3 cents today to between 6.2 and 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour — a 20-percent price hike.
German consumers already pay the highest electricity prices in Europe. But because the government is failing to get the costs of its new energy policy under control, rising prices are already on the horizon. Electricity is becoming a luxury good in Germany, and one of the country’s most important future-oriented projects is acutely at risk.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/high-costs-and-errors-of-german-transition-to-renewable-energy-a-920288.html
July 20, 2021 at 12:28 pm
I think using seven-year-old numbers in a growing industry like wind power is naive at best and deceitful at worst.
The marginal cost for wind energy is ~zero. Fossil Fuel power plants must be continuously extracted, processed and purchased to produce power. Some US coal-powered plants have been operating at a loss for years, with the extra cost placed on the ratepayers.
FF combustion products are bad for lungs of humans, other mammals and birds. It costs more to add catalytic converters, filters and scrubbers to FF-burning machines.
I wonder at how strong your argument is if you have to rely on 8-year-old Der Spiegel articles to make it. In 1992 I was using an acoustically-coupled modem to connect with my computer at work.
July 20, 2021 at 9:13 pm
rhymeswithgoalie Says: “The marginal cost for wind energy is ~zero.”, whatever that means. “Marginal cost refers to the increase or decrease in the cost of producing one more unit or serving one more customer. It is also known as incremental cost.”
rhymeswithgoalie Says; “I wonder at how strong your argument is if you have to rely on 8-year-old Der Spiegel articles to make it.” This site is maintaining the same thing that the 8-year-old Der Spiegel article made, that Germans pay a much higher price for their electricity because of the cost of wind and solar.
Global electricity prices by select country September 2020
Jul 6, 2021
Germany has the highest electricity prices worldwide. In September 2020, German households were charged around 0.36 U.S. dollars per kilowatt hour plus value added tax. By comparison, in neighboring Poland, residents paid half as much, while households in the United States were charged even less.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/
rhymeswithgoalie Says: “Some US coal-powered plants have been operating at a loss for years, with the extra cost placed on the ratepayers.” It then seems that is not effecting the cost of electricity much in the US.
The average electricity rate is 13.19 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh).
The average price a residential customer in the United States pays for electricity is 13.31 cents per kWh.
https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
July 18, 2021 at 4:38 pm
those proposals are widely expected to meet vigorous objections both from within Europe and from other countries whose businesses could be threatened by the proposed carbon border tax
And I am sure Germany, Netherlands and Belgium will be impressed after this.
July 19, 2021 at 12:52 am
Those talks are in November. That’s a political eternity away.
July 20, 2021 at 5:10 am
rhymeswithgoalie Says: “The ferocity of these disasters is as notable as their timing, coming ahead of the global talks in Glasgow to try to reach agreement on fighting climate change.
Those talks are in November. That’s a political eternity away.”
Are the talks in Glasgow in November going to keep there from being future rainstorms in Europe or warm conditions in the Western part of the US that are happening now? Where was all of the worry and gnashing of teeth when this was happening in February in Texas and other parts of the US?
“Texas told residents they should conserve power due to frozen turbines and equipment. As of 6 p.m. on Sunday night, a little less than half of all its installments were frozen or unable to operate due to the extreme cold, according to ABC Dallas affiliate WFAA-TV.
There are widespread power outages elsewhere, including Oregon, with more than 249,000 customers without power, 166,000 in Virginia, 37,000 in North Carolina, and 11,172 in Kentucky”.
https://dailydodge.com/texas-emergency-proclamation-approved-as-dangerous-winter-storm-causes-power-outages-2/
More than 3.8 million homes without power as unprecedented winter storm hits Texas
February 15, 2021 at 10:30
More than 3.8 million homes are experiencing power outages across the U.S. state of Texas and another 118 000 across Louisiana, 58 000 in Mississippi, and 163 000 in Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky after extremely cold temperatures and frozen precipitation blanketed parts of U.S. South, crippling transportation and infrastructure. Texas Governor Gregg Abbot issued a statewide disaster declaration on February 12, warning all residents the state faces an unprecedented winter storm.
All 254 Texas counties were placed under Winter Storm Warning on Saturday, February 13, the same as in Oklahoma and Arkansas on Sunday.
As of Monday morning, February 15, more than 150 million Americans are under Winter Storm Warnings, Ice Storm Warnings, Winter Storm Watches, or Winter Weather Advisories as impactful winter weather continues from coast-to-coast.
https://watchers.news/2021/02/15/massive-power-outages-winter-storm-texas-february-2021/
July 20, 2021 at 12:33 pm
No those talks should have happened 20 years ago. Instead people have been dicking around whining about the cost of prevention.
The point of the article is that deniers and slow-goers are more likely to change their tunes when it is happening to them, rather than relying on oil/coal/gas industry lobbyists’ soothing BS.
July 20, 2021 at 12:42 pm
I don’t know what your point is about this year’s Big Freeze in Texas. I was without power just over 4 days (which is why I wished I had the connector technology to run my house off of my Leaf battery). The Texas grid is geared to the free market rather than having minimal reliability regulations. We also had a power-conservation alert in June during moderate temperature conditions due to thermal power plant shut-downs.
July 19, 2021 at 3:51 am
I don’t think anyone thought developing countries were crying wolf, it’s just that disasters there happen far away to dark people, so those in charge in rich countries don’t care. Now that white people are being hurt by it, we may inch closer to getting some people to relax their denial. However, there are lots of lines of defense left.
We’re still stuck with the Pearl Harbor/string of pearls paradox, in which every extraordinary event is dismissed as a one-off that has nothing to do with climate and is just a regular disaster, while repeated disasters (multiple worst fire years ever, two 1000-year droughts in 5 years…) are dismissed as background. People get acclimatized, there’s short term shifting baseline syndrome, and people pretend or imagine it’s always been this way. No amount of misfortune will ever change the minds of those at the edge of reason, though we may still reach people not thoroughly indoctrinated into the cult.
July 19, 2021 at 12:47 pm
I don’t think that Western Europe is getting its fair share of wildfire smoke, being predominantly upwind.
July 20, 2021 at 5:42 am
J4Zonian Says: “Now that white people are being hurt by it, we may inch closer to getting some people to relax their denial.” I wonder if J4Zonian is aware that the deadliest hurricane to ever strike the United States killed mostly white people. What was the CO₂ level in 1900 when this killer storm killed so many people?
(The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 was the deadliest hurricane to ever hit the United States and caused between 8000 and 12000 deaths.)
http://geology.com/hurricanes/largest-hurricane/
While on the subject of hurricanes, this that follow should be of interest to anyone interested in facts and not made up conjectures.
The United States recently went through its longest period in recorded history without a major hurricane strike, experiencing its fewest total hurricanes in any eight-year period. And IPCC’s 2018 Interim Report observes there is “only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.”
The average number of strong tornadoes annually from 1986 to 2017 was 40 percent less than from 1954 to 1985,” Alexander wrote concerning the absence of changes in tornado trends during the recent period of modest warming
In 2017 and 2019, NOAA reported the United States is undergoing its longest period in recorded history with fewer than 40 percent of the country experiencing “very dry” conditions.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/ipcc-and-skeptics-agree-climate-change-is-not-causing-extreme-weather_3400695.html?fbclid=IwAR06D_l7QrIXY2QF5EFxDw44l-jNsfrcpm0udhL_Bb02Q55d9i2Ssr9x7c4
July 20, 2021 at 1:08 pm
“I wonder if J4Zonian is aware that the deadliest hurricane to ever strike the United States killed mostly white people.” Wow. The deadliest hurricane to ever strike a mostly-white country killed mostly white people. I’ll bet the deadliest earthquake to strike a mostly-white city killed mostly white people, or the deadliest wildfire to hit a mostly-white town killed mostly white people.
What in hell does the hurricane death toll from before there were modern hurricane tracking and warning systems have to do with this?
BTW, the link you gave is to a “viewpoint” piece in the Falun Gong newspaper, and it requires registration to view. I did read “retired Oxford physicist” in the first line, which set off the Old Crank Physicist red flag. Also, that he writes for the fossil fuel lobbying group Global Warming Policy Foundation. Do you really think these articles provide honest, disinterested information information, or do you just think we’ll fall for them?
July 21, 2021 at 3:51 am
rhymeswithgoalie Says: “Also, that he writes for the fossil fuel lobbying group Global Warming Policy Foundation.” I would like for rhymeswithgoalie to list for me what the global warning/anthropogenic climate change cabal of charlatans collectively do to help humanity attain more equitable and longer lives. This group has the resources to be of help to humanity; but it is mainly only themselves that they help out.
It appears that the alarmist should have enough money to validate their claims about how their manufactured devil in the sky, the essential for all terrestrial life on Earth, CO₂, is somehow going to destroy the planet; but, so far no such evidence has been presented by any of these well-funded organizations. Why is that, Patrick Shoemaker?
“Ron Arnold and Paul Driessen, authors of the 2018 book Cracking Big Green, learned to read IRS form 990 in the annual reports of non-profit organizations. They focused on the readily available year 2012. You can be sure the dollars they found to have been received that year have increased in the more recent years of Climate Change hysteria. Here is what they found to have been the incomes of some of the major well known groups in 2012 alone.”
The Sierra Club took in $97,757,678
The Sierra Club Foundation took in $47,163,599
The Environmental Defense Fund took in $111,915,138
Natural Resources Defense Council $98,701,707
National Audubon Society $96,206,883
National Wildlife Federation $84,726,518
Greenpeace USA $32,791,149
National Parks Conservation Association $25,782,975
The Wilderness Society $24,862,909
Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection $19,150,215
But those are the medium sized incomes, here are the biggies:
The Nature Conservancy $949,132,306
Greenpeace International $406,000,000
Wildlife Conservation Society $230,042,654
World Wildlife Fund $208,495,555
US government funding for skeptical scientists
$ 0
Meanwhile this is just a small part of what the petroleum industry provide for rhymeswithgoalie so that it can curse the industry.
What are petroleum products, and what is petroleum used for?
Petroleum products include transportation fuels, fuel oils for heating and electricity generation, asphalt and road oil, and feedstocks for making the chemicals, plastics, and synthetic materials that are in nearly everything we use. In 2018, of the approximately 7.5 billion barrels of total U.S. petroleum consumption, 46% was motor gasoline (includes fuel ethanol), 20% was distillate fuel (heating oil and diesel fuel), and 8% was jet fuel.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=41&t=6
July 23, 2021 at 2:18 pm
Water is essential for life.
By your logic, floods aren’t a problem.
July 23, 2021 at 5:08 pm
Many companies and industries make society pay for the cost while they take the profit. This is the economic and moral core of the problem.
I know that fossil fuels have been useful for the development and comfort of middle and upper class society in the US and other industrialized countries, and companies have made a lot of money providing it. I even know that the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania meant the ending of the whale-oil industry.
The petroleum industry was aware of the problem of adding too much CO2 to the planet’s atmosphere for over fifty years. Reducing the impact of those emissions would have cost them profits. First they ignored, then hid the evidence. It is cheaper (for them) to flare off gas at the refineries than to capture and use them. Then they started active doubt and disinformation campaigns, coupled with political donations to key committee members, to prevent the public from realizing how much damage their products were doing and demanding change.
Even well before that the petroleum and other industries have used the US military to protect their interests overseas since the late 19th century. We’ve cozied up to and even oppressive regimes to maintain the flow of oil rather than seeking alternatives and reducing use. Meanwhile, consumers were shown cheery advertisements telling them to buy gas-guzzlers to “see the USA”. With more people consuming their products, smog became a problem in some places. Oil and coal companies fought regulations to clean up emissions, and car and oil companies fought demands for greater fuel efficiency. (Diesel truck emissions are still a big problem for children’s lungs.) They still made money, but maybe not as much.
I have no problem using petroleum to make products like asphalt and chemical feedstocks, as long as the ecological/social cost is included in the price. Asphalt, for one, is highly recycled. That’s unlike fuel products, which are used once, and then someone has to go back and buy some more from the petroleum industry and burn that, too. What a racket.
Most consumers don’t want to buy products made by slaves or which permanently damage ecosystems. They don’t see the oil spilling down the remote waterways or poisoning the Nigerian delta country, they just tank up or turn up the thermostat while they’re figuring out what to cook for dinner.
And don’t ever, ever compare the amount of money nonprofits take to clean and protect the environment to for-profit operations that made money while externalizing the cost. That’s disgusting.
July 20, 2021 at 1:14 pm
I don’t know who “Alexander” is, but if you want to know the facts, some hard-core tornado nerds just summarized what’s known about the current tornado regime:
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/07/climate-change-and-tornadoes-any-connection/
One difference: US tornadoes are shifting further east.
July 20, 2021 at 6:11 am
J4Zonian Says: “…in which every extraordinary event is dismissed as a one-off that has nothing to do with climate and is just a regular disaster, while repeated disasters (multiple worst fire years ever, two 1000-year droughts in 5 years…) are dismissed as background”. The people who experienced ‘The Great Fires of 1910 (The Big Blowup) – August 20th’ most likely didn’t try to blame it on CO₂. What was the CO₂ level in 1910?
“That was certainly the case by mid-August 1910. In a drought-ridden year, hundreds of small fires were burning across the Northern Rockies of Idaho and Montana. The Forest Service had pulled out all the stops to subdue the blazes, deploying 4,000 troops to supplement the thousands of civilian firefighters already at work.
But nothing could prepare them for what August 20 would bring. Hurricane force winds blasted into the region, inciting embers and low flames into a conflagration of shocking proportion. Forester Edward Stahl described flames hundreds of feet high that were “fanned by a tornado wind so violent that the flames flattened out ahead, swooping to earth in great darting curves, truly a veritable red demon from hell.”
In the short two days that the great blowup’s life spanned, more than 3 million acres burned. Smoke from the fire reached New England and soot floated as far away as Greenland. Small communities were obliterated and more than 85 lives were lost.”
https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-forests-magazine/blazing-battles-the-1910-fire-and-its-legacy
July 20, 2021 at 6:33 am
J4Zonian Says: “… two 1000-year droughts in 5 years…” while giving no explanation just what that is supposed to mean. This that I now present describes what real droughts were over an 11-year span from 1930-1940. I wonder if J4Zonian can present a reasonable estimate of what the CO₂ level may have been during this 11 year period and if it was high enough to have produced this horrible time in our history?
“Over the 11-year span from 1930-1940, a large part of the region saw 15% to 25% less precipitation than normal. This is very significant to see such a large deficit over such a long period of time. This translates to 50 to 60 inches of much needed moisture which never arrived that decade. For an area which only averages less than 20 inches of precipitation a year, deficits like this can make the region resemble a desert. Deficits like this are the equivalent of missing three entire years of expected precipitation in one decade. Figure 2 is a map of the precipitation departures from normal in terms of a percentage of normal (total precipitation divided by normal precipitation) for the Dust Bowl region for 1930 to 1940.
https://www.weather.gov/ama/dust_bowl_versus_today
July 20, 2021 at 1:22 pm
Do you think that heat waves in the past (from other causes) is proof that heat waves today are not because of AGW-produced climate change?
Do you know that we can measure the major weakening of the jet stream as the Arctic warmed up?
Do you know that the predicted slowing of the jet stream means longer stalled heat waves and cold waves (Texas this February) and rain machines will become more frequent?
July 20, 2021 at 6:35 am
J4Zonian Says: “… two 1000-year droughts in 5 years…”
NASA Study Finds 1934 Had Worst Drought of Last Thousand Years
October 14, 2014
A new study using a reconstruction of North American drought history over the last 1,000 years found that the drought of 1934 was the driest and most widespread of the last millennium.
Using a tree-ring-based drought record from the years 1000 to 2005 and modern records, scientists from NASA and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory found the 1934 drought was 30 percent more severe than the runner-up drought (in 1580) and extended across 71.6 percent of western North America. For comparison, the average extent of the 2012 drought was 59.7 percent.
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/1934-had-worst-drought-of-last-thousand-years/
July 20, 2021 at 1:34 pm
News flash: Those “…two 1000-year droughts in 5 years…” happened after your 2014 report about the 1934 US drought.
A drought in 1934 is not proof that today’s droughts are not made much worse than they otherwise would be due to the extra heat and the jetstream changes from climate change.
Let’s see that again:
Examples of individual catastrophes in the past do not challenge the understanding that global warming is accelerating due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
July 20, 2021 at 1:49 pm
Considering both the acceleration of global warming science and observed changes and the rapidly improving technologies of EV and renewable energy/storage infrastructure, I recommend that you go back to your database of anti-AGW and anti-RE talking points and cull the obsolete opinion pieces and factoids.
Please take into account that a lot of the delay in adapting our grids and improving power generation technology is due to longstanding, deliberate, well-funded effort on the part of oil/gas/coal industries to undermine them.
[Of course, if you’re just trying to Gish gallop the discussion, fuck off.]
July 21, 2021 at 3:55 am
It is really hard to believe that since these alarmist only have a slight rise in temperature to feel that it is validating their claim that there is anthropogenic global warming caused by the essential for all life trace gas, CO₂, that they seem to be forgetting that there actually was a Little Ice Age that the Earth began to recover from.
“Average global temps
In the 1880s: 56.7 F.
1920s to 1980s: 57.2 F.
Circa 2000 to 2010: 58.1 F.
These are not ‘hot’ temps. Below 60 degrees most people start putting on sweaters and jackets. At 58⁰F in your living room you’re probably gonna turn up the heat! It is a good temp for longer term wine storage”.
https://www.iceagenow.info/temperatures-have-been-falling-for-8000-years/
58.1⁰F – 56.7⁰F = 1.4 ⁰F in 130 years is nothing to wreak a nation’s economy over, unless that is your plan.
July 25, 2021 at 5:56 pm
You’re treating this like it’s a thermostat in your living room. You hereby fail Freshman Physics.
We talk about “temperature” because most people—including you—don’t understand heat. Temperature describes the average overall heat of a certain range of area, like your living room, a swimming pool, a cup of tea, a lake. A swimming pool at 80°F has more heat than a cup of tea at 120°F. DO YOU GET THAT?*
AGW is about the Earth gaining more heat energy than it used to.
Most of the heat is being absorbed by the oceans, which control the weather.
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*I know you don’t get that. You don’t understand any of it. You’re like a bot responding to certain phrases and keywords that you recognize and replying with something from your database of supposedly “gotcha” factoids.