Category: Climate Change

Doing the math of global warming

~ susie ~ 7 Comments

Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone. Please, go read the entire article:

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.


Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the “largest temperature departure from average of any season on record.” The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet’s history.


Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world’s nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn’t even attend. It was “a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago,” the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls “once thronged by multitudes.” Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I’ve spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.


When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn’t yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.

An ounce of prevention

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Would have been a better idea!

German researchers on Wednesday said they had evidence that sowing the ocean with iron particles sucks up and stores carbon dioxide (CO2), preventing the gas from stoking dangerous climate change.


But their work, touching on a fiercely controversial issue called geo-engineering, came under attack from other scientists and environmentalists.


These said a far bigger question — whether such schemes could damage the marine biosphere — remained unanswered.


Published in the science journal Nature, the paper is one of the biggest and most detailed probes into ocean fertilisation, a practice that is banned under international law although scientific research into it is permitted.


Its goal is to take CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in the deep sea so that it no longer adds to the greenhouse effect.


This would be done by scattering the ocean surface with iron dust, a nutrient for microscope marine vegetation called phytoplankton. As the plants gorge on the iron, they also suck up atmospheric CO2 thanks to natural photosynthesis.


In the next step, the phytoplankton die and sink to the deep ocean floor — taking with them the CO2, which would lie in the sediment, possibly for centuries.

Corn crop estimated drop ‘by the hour’

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Now remember, many of our foods are dependent on corn. The bulk of corn grown in the U.S. is consumed by livestock, poultry, and fish production. Approximately 12% of the U.S. corn crop ends up in foods that are either consumed directly or indirectly, and has many industrial uses including ethanol. So this is not good news at all – and will most likely translate into much higher food costs.

Good thing the administration has taken such bold moves to prevent further global warming, huh?

CHICAGO, July 17 (Reuters) – U.S. corn production has shrunk 7 percent versus the government’s downgraded estimate a week ago, a Reuters poll found on Tuesday, with a worsening drought likely to cause more damage before the month is out.

As the worst drought since 1956 begins to expand to the northern and western Midwest, areas that had previously been spared, analysts are slashing corn yield estimates by the hour. Some analysts are also starting to cut their forecasts on the number of acres that will be harvested as farmers opt to plough under their fields to claim insurance.

What began the season as a potentially record corn crop as farmers planted the biggest area since 1937, may now be the smallest in at least five years. Soybeans, which enter their key pod-setting phase later then corn, are increasingly at risk. The poll of 13 analysts pegged the average estimated corn yield at 137.2 bushels per acre, down 6 percent from USDA’s current forecast of 146 bushels.

The USDA dropped its yield estimate by an unprecedented 20 bushels per acre in its report on July 11. Corn production was pegged at 12.077 billion bushels, the smallest in 5 years, down 6.9 percent from USDA’s outlook. “We’re losing more yield with the additional stress now in the northern areas which up until now had been pretty good,” said Shawn McCambridge, analyst for Jefferies Bache.

The not-so-mighty Mississippi

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

When you see some of the crazy “issues” being raised in this presidential election instead of leadership on climate change, doesn’t it make you want to scream? Not only are we going to have massive crop failures as a result of this ongoing drought, we aren’t even able to ship the crops we have when shipping channels like the formerly-mighty Mississippi are drying up:

Companies operating along the Mississippi River are seeing a drastic cut in business as severe drought lowers water levels and makes shipping increasingly difficult.The drought, which now covers more than 1,000 counties across the US, has dropped water levels 50 feet below last year’s levels in some places. Last winter’s lack of snow, the absence of any major tropical storms from the Gulf of Mexico, sweltering temperatures, and the lack of rain this spring and summer are to blame for the shallow water.

The Mississippi is a major trade conduit through the central U.S. Barges, which are often cheaper to operate than trains or trucks, carry goods such as grain, corn, soybeans, steel, rubber, coffee, fertilizer, coal, and petroleum products in and out of the interior of the country.

As the water levels fall, barges have run aground near Vicksburg, Mississippi, where the water is already less than 5 feet deep, and shipping companies have been forced to curtail their business. The Wall Street Journal reports:

‘It’s causing headaches all up and down the river system right now,’ said Martin Hettel, senior manager of bulk sales for AEP River Operations, a St. Louis-based barge company.Mark Fletcher, owner of Ceres Barge Line of East St. Louis, Ill., said about 70% of his 220 barges aren’t being used now. First, the drought cut crops, reducing demand for shipping. Now, low water levels are making it more costly to ship.

‘It’s not good if you are in the barge business right now,’ he said. ‘In the last 60 days, you’ve watched a whole lot of money go out the window.’

Some river ports have been forced to close temporarily or shut down parts of their operations because of the low water levels. At the port of Rosedale in the Mississippi Delta, port director Robert Maxwell Jr. said water levels are about 50 feet below what they were last year, when flooding shut down the port. If the water falls any lower, there was a ‘high likelihood’ he would have to close, he said. One of the port’s public loading docks is inoperable, with equipment normally in the water now hanging the air. The Army Corps of Engineers is supposed to come this week to dredge, where heavy equipment is used to dig out sediment from waterways to make them passable for shipping.