And Mayor Bloomberg’s stealth visit:
These people are so fucked, and of course the national media doesn’t bother to cover their plight. Anyone who’s waiting for the city government to fix things will have a very long wait. Yet they’re closing down the Occupy Sandy supply hubs, where they’re actually helping people? Fuck them.
Megastorms could drown massive portions of California. [Via Scientific American.]
The drought may shut down the river to barge traffic.
Is must be asked — what sort of “ambitious measures” could possibly hold back the ocean? From The Raw Story:
Sea-level rise is occurring much faster than scientists expected – exposing millions more Americans to the destructive floods produced by future Sandy-like storms, new research suggests.
Satellite measurements over the last two decades found global sea levels rising 60% faster than the computer projections issued only a few years ago by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The faster sea-level rise means the authorities will have to take even more ambitious measures to protect low-lying population centres – such as New York City, Los Angeles or Jacksonville, Florida – or risk exposing millions more people to a destructive combination of storm surges on top of sea-level rise, scientists said…
Californians told to prepare for their own big storms.
I wonder if Obama listens to anyone who doesn’t work for Wall Street?
The former vice-president and climate champion, Al Gore, has called on Barack Obama to seize the moment and use his re-election victory to push through bold action on climate change.
The president has faced rising public pressure in the wake of superstorm Sandy to deliver on his promise to act on global warming.
But none of those calling on Obama to act carries the moral authority of Gore, who has devoted his post-political career to building a climate movement.
Now, Gore said, it is the president’s turn. He urged Obama to immediately begin pushing for a carbon tax in negotiations over the “fiscal cliff” budget crisis.
The vice-president’s intervention for a carbon tax could give critical support to an idea that has gained currency since the election – at least among Washington thinktanks. The conservative American Enterprise Institute held an all-day seminar on the carbon tax on Tuesday.
“I think all who look at these circumstances should agree that president Obama does have a mandate, should he choose to use it, to act boldly to solve the climate crisis, to begin solving it,” Gore told the Guardian in a telephone interview.
“He has the mandate. He has the opportunity, and he has the inherent ability to provide the leadership needed. I really hope that he will, and I will respectfully ask him to do exactly that.”
Gore will ratchet up his own pressure on Wednesday evening when he hosts a 24-hour live online broadcast from New York city on the connections between climate change and extreme events such as Sandy.
The Dirty Weather Report, produced by his Climate Reality Project, will kick off with footage from New Jersey’s devastated shore and interviews with governors Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo. It begins at 8pm eastern time.
Between this and the recent story that global warming presents a threat to the survival of cocoa beans, you’d think people would be paying a lot more attention to the possibility to the possibility of losing their favorite beverage:
Forget about super-sizing into the trenta a few years from now: Starbucks is warning of a threat to the world coffee supply because of climate change.
In a telephone interview with the Guardian, Jim Hanna, the company’s sustainability director, said its farmers were already seeing the effects of a changing climate, with severe hurricanes and more resistant bugs reducing crop yields.
The company is now preparing for the possibility of a serious threat to global supplies. “What we are really seeing as a company as we look 10, 20, 30 years down the road – if conditions continue as they are – is a potentially significant risk to our supply chain, which is the Arabica coffee bean,” Hanna said.
It was the second warning in less than a month of a threat to a food item many people can’t live without.
New research from the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture warned it would be too hot to grow chocolate in much of the Ivory Coast and Ghana, the world’s main producers, by 2050.
Hanna is to travel to Washington on Friday to brief members of Congress on climate change and coffee at an event sponsored by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The coffee giant is part of a business coalition that has been trying to push Congress and the Obama administration to act on climate change – without success, as Hanna acknowledged.
The coalition, including companies like Gap, are next month launching a new campaign – showcasing their own action against climate change – ahead of the release of a landmark science report from the UN’s IPCC.
Hanna told the Guardian the company’s suppliers, who are mainly in Central America, were already experiencing changing rainfall patterns and more severe pest infestations.
‘There’s been all this research and so little action’
The Huffington Post has a very comprehensive look at how local and state officials did little to stop rapid and dense development along the NY and NJ coast, despite knowing the growing risks of global warming. Excellent work.
It makes me a little nuts when people insist they can’t draw a direct line between global warming and extreme weather, because they really don’t understand how it actually works. This Mother Jones piece does an excellent job of explaining the connection:
Superstorm Sandy—and its revival of the issue of climate change, most prominently through Michael Bloomberg’s sudden endorsement—probably aided President Obama’s reelection victory last night. But at the same time, there has been a vast debate about the true nature of the storm’s connections to global warming (as well as plenty of denialism regarding those connections). In fact, there has even been the suggestion, by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, that if we all stopped thinking about causation as something direct (I pushed him, he fell) and rather as something systemic (indirect, probabilistic), then we really could say with full accuracy that global warming caused Sandy. Systemically.
Following this debate, I’ve been struck by the strong impression that people are making things too complicated. Here’s the simple truth: Leaving aside questions of systemic causation—and sidestepping probabilities, loaded dice, atmospheres on steroids, and so on—we can nevertheless say that global warming made Sandy directly and unmistakably worse, because of its contribution to sea level rise.
“I keep telling people the one lock you have here is sea level rise,” meteorologist Scott Mandiaexplained to me recently. “It’s the one thing that absolutely made the storm worse that you can’t wiggle out of.”
Mandia is an expert on the subject at Suffolk County Community College, and coauthor of the new book Rising Sea Levels: An Introduction to Cause and Impact.
And how do we know Mandia is right? Here’s the logic.
First, according to sea level expert Ben Strauss of Climate Central, the sea level in the New York harbor today is 15 inches higher than it was in 1880. Now, to be sure, not all of that is due global warming—land has also been subsiding. Strauss estimates that climate change—which causes sea level rise both through the melting of land-based ice, and through thermal expansion of warm ocean water—is responsible for just over half, or eight inches, of the total. As it happens, the estimated sea level rise seen globally since the year 1880 is also roughly eight inches.
So how, then, did global warming directly make Sandy worse? Simple: Sandy threw the ocean at the land, and because of global warming, there were about eight inches more ocean to throw. “The footprint of the flood was bigger, based on roughly eight extra inches of depth,” Strauss explains—eight inches more than there would have been in an admittedly hypothetical world in which Sandy arrived without our burning of fossil fuels or heating of the atmosphere.
[…] Consider the US Army Corps of Engineers’ “depth-damage” functions, which the Corps uses to study how much flood damage grows with an increasing water level. The upshot here, says Mandia, is that “the damage is exponential, it’s not linear.” Or in other words, as the water level increases, the level of damage tends to rise much more steeply than the mere level of water itself.
A collection of long-form journalism on global warming — you know, the stuff our policy makers essentially ignore in hopes it would go away?
