NASA: Worst of El Nino Still to Come. With Climate Change in the Mix, 2015-2016 Event May Equal Most Devastating On Record

Posted on December 30, 2015 by GarryRogers

GR: Perhaps a year of extremes will help bring more people to their senses. Human population pressure (building, farming, logging, grazing, poisoning) has eliminated half of Earth’s accumulated genetic marvels. With population pressure continuing, and with human-caused climate change creating relatively sudden habitat changes, many more of our fellow creatures will surely be lost. Some of the finest minds I’ve encountered have fought for climate prudence. So far, they have failed to slow the change. I’m hopeful that this year’s weather will lend them a hand. Human activities are battering our ecosystems. Harsh weather will be harmful too, but worth it if it wakes up a few more of our too gullible citizens. [So it has to be “like” for me.]

robertscribbler

Like and not like.

When we look at the 2015-2016 El Nino and compare it with the 1997-1998 monster we find both similarities and differences.

First the differences. The 2015-2016 El Nino is firing off in a global atmosphere that is on the order of 0.25 C hotter than 1997-1998. It’s an event that’s spring-boarding off an unprecedented hot blob of water in the Northeastern Pacific. One that some studies have linked to human-forced climate change and that has been associated with a plethora of ills ranging from failing ocean health, to the California drought, to strange and troubling warm air and water invasions entering the Arctic. It’s an event that’s occurring in the context of yet another extreme warm air invasion of the Arctic now ongoing in the North Atlantic. And, likely, it’s an event that has, overall, been torqued and twisted by the ongoing pressure of atmospheric…

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What Exxon Knew, Texaco and Other Oil Companies Knew Too

Posted on December 23, 2015 by GarryRogers

All the Oil Companies Knew

GR: Hard evidence shows that our major oil companies knew the damage they were doing and it shows that they spent money to hide the evidence. Now if we can prove damages, we can prosecute the oil companies for reparations. Winning will force energy producers to cut CO2 emissions and to compensate their victims.

The big question is whether the oil businesses have enough money to subvert national legal systems and prevent prosecution of the corporations and their directors. Will this be like the bank bailouts where we gave the criminals financial rewards?

Peter Sinclair of Climate Denial Crocks submitted the following story. The video and the full story linked to Sinclair’s item are well worth watching.

What Exxon Knew, Texaco Knew, Too

“And so did Chevron, Amoco, Phillips, Shell, Sunoco and Sohio. Newest installment in the incredible and tragic saga of what the oil industry knew about climate change, and when they knew it – the most under-reported story of 2015.

“A snip here, but go to the link for the whole piece. And if you haven’t yet, check the video above, and go to Inside Climate News to follow up on the whole story.”

Inside Climate News:

An InsideClimate News investigative series has shown that Exxon launched its own cutting-edge CO₂ sampling program in 1978 in order to understand a phenomenon it suspected could harm its business. About a decade later, Exxon spearheaded campaigns to cast doubt on climate science and stall regulation of greenhouse gases. The previously unpublished papers about the climate task force indicate that API, (American Petroleum Institute) the industry’s most powerful lobbying group, followed a similar arc to Exxon’s in confronting the threat of climate change.

Just as Exxon began tracking climate science in the late 1970s, when only small groups of scientists in academia and the government were engaged in the research, other oil companies did the same, the documents show.”

Activist calls for removal of leg-hold traps on public lands

Posted on December 13, 2015 by GarryRogers

Trapping, hunting, livestock grazing, logging, mining, and more are the ways that public land is used. Not for the sake of the land or its creatures, but for the benefit of one species. And not even in the best interests of that species, land use of the public land has never been sustainable; it has always been destructive. Our schools do not tell our children about nature, and our leaders whose “beliefs” are determined by the finances of special interests deny it. A century and a half ago, Humboldt, Thoreau, Marsh, and others recognized and alerted us to the demise of nature in the name of progress and profit. Blocked by our leaders, the message has been repeated by Leopold, Abbey, Wilson and others whose wisdom is no match for human avarice and impatience.

Exposing the Big Game

Activist calls for removal of leg-hold traps on public lands

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/life/features/activist-calls-for-removal-of-leg-hold-traps-on-public/article_244c1088-fc31-5ad1-bf6b-b06f9cbbc585.html#.Vm2qoPjl6N4.facebook

Z Jacobson of Santa Fe walks Friday with her dogsNoodles on Dead Dog Trail off Old Buckman Road, where Noodles got caught in a trap. The experience has turned Jacobson into an activist, with a goal of banning leg-hold traps on public lands. Luis Sánchez Saturno/The New Mexican

Posted: Saturday, December 12, 2015

By Anne Constable
The New MexicanSantaFeNewMexican.com | 17 comments

Z Jacobson was hiking with her dogs, Noodles and Lulu, and a friend along a new trail off Old Buckman Road in the Santa Fe National Forest on Thanksgiving Day.

It’s ominously called Dead Dog Trail, and it leads to the top of the Caja del Rio Plateau. Jacobson’s friend had helped build it, and she was interested in touring a couple of canyons along the way said to contain rock art.

During the hike, they walked over to a cliff and were admiring the view when…

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Demonstrate for an End to Global Warming

Posted on November 29, 2015 by GarryRogers

Climate-change demonstrations show our leaders that we want them to take steps to stop global warming. We must also ask our leaders to change the human activities that are causing climate change.

We want them to block corporate control over our government and the decisions it makes.
We want them to end international sales of weapons and begin to encourage peace and a focus on life style and resource use.
We want them to discourage unsustainable resource harvests.
We want them to encourage human rights and equality.
We want them to speak out for wild animals and natural ecosystems.
We want them to call for restoring the damaged lands and seas.
And finally, we want them to oppose gender inequality and overpopulation.

Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels today, activities causing climate change would continue. Farming, deforestation, industrial fishing, desertification, construction, and growth of the human population would continue to waste the Earth and release CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

Consume more, conserve more: sorry, but we just can’t do both | George Monbiot

Posted on November 25, 2015 by GarryRogers

“Governments urge us both to consume more and to conserve more. We must extract more fossil fuel from the ground, but burn less of it. We should reduce, reuse and recycle the stuff that enters our homes, and at the same time increase, discard and replace it. How else can the consumer economy grow? We should eat less meat to protect the living planet, and eat more meat to boost the farming industry. These policies are irreconcilable. The new analyses suggest that economic growth is the problem, regardless of whether the word sustainable is bolted to the front of it.

“It’s not just that we don’t address this contradiction; scarcely anyone dares even name it. It’s as if the issue is too big, too frightening to contemplate. We seem unable to face the fact that our utopia is also our dystopia; that production appears to be indistinguishable from destruction.” From: www.theguardian.com

GR: In Arizona, the government asks us to conserve water while, at the same time, the government invites more people and businesses to move here. Perhaps we should begin awarding huge cash prizes for promoting zero growth.

Forest Service Revs Up Push to Open Over 170 Million Tons of Coal to Mining From Colorado Roadless Forest

Posted on November 19, 2015 by GarryRogers

Proposed Loophole Could Cause Millions of Tons of Carbon Pollution, undermine Obama Administration Climate Goals, and Degrade Wildlife Habitat

DENVER— National and local conservation groups today condemned a decision by the U.S. Forest Service to continue pressing to open national forest roadless areas in Colorado to coal mining.
Bulldozer
Photo of bulldozer near Sunset Roadless Area courtesy U.S. Forest Service. Photos are available for media use.

In a notice filed today, the Forest Service announced it would move forward by issuing a draft environmental impact statement on the proposal to pave the way for mining. The proposal would reopen a loophole in the “roadless rule” for national forests in Colorado to enable Arch Coal — the nation’s second largest coal company — to scrape roads and well pads on nearly 20,000 acres of otherwise-protected, publicly owned national forest and wildlife habitat in Colorado’s North Fork Valley.

The loophole was thrown out by the U.S. District Court of Colorado last year because the Forest Service had failed to consider the climate change impacts of mining as much as 350 million tons of coal in the national forest. (Today’s notice reduces the estimated coal available to 173 million tons.) The Forest Service admits that reopening the loophole could result in hundreds of millions of tons of additional carbon pollution from mining and burning the coal. That carbon pollution could cost the global economy and environment billions of dollars, according to today’s notice. From: www.biologicaldiversity.org

GR: Apparently, the U. S. Forest Service isn’t satisfied with just clear-cutting the forests; it wants to widen its attack with more roads and more global warming CO2 emissions. Way-to-go Forest Service!

Finland’s nuclear waste burial plan

Posted on November 18, 2015 by GarryRogers

As in all things we do, we humans have a very shortsighted view of the future. We have 5-year plans, we discuss what might happen by the end of the century, and all the while, we are destroying species and ecosystems that took thousands of years to develop. Nuclear wastes will be with us for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Don’t we expect to be around still? Do we expect that within a few hundred years we will have found the means to destroy our wastes? Scientists are warning that our civilization may not survive human-caused global warming and our planet-wide ecocide. Our descendants, living in collapsing buildings and searching the ruins for anything edible, do not need radiation sickness to contend with as well.

nuclear-news

Finland’s Nuclear Waste Solution. IEEE Spectrum, By Sandra Upson 30 Nov 2009 Here on Olkiluoto Island, the forest is king. Elk and deer graze near sun-dappled rivers and shimmering streams, and humans search out blueberries and chanterelle mushrooms. Weathered red farmhouses sit along sleepy dirt roads in fields abutting the woods. Far beneath the vivid green forest, deep in the bedrock, workers are digging the labyrinthine passages and chambers that they hope to someday pack with all of Finland’s spent nuclear fuel.

Posiva, the Finnish company building an underground repository here, says it knows how to imprison nuclear waste for 100 000 years. These multimillennial thinkers are confident that copper canisters of Scandinavian design, tucked into that bedrock, will isolate the waste in an underground cavern impervious to whatever the future brings: sinking permafrost, rising water, earthquakes, copper-eating microbes, or oblivious land developers in the year 25 000. If the Finnish…

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Choking air, melting glaciers: how global warming is changing India

Posted on November 17, 2015 by GarryRogers

Globally, India is the third largest carbon-emitting country—though its per capita emissions are only one third of the international average—according to the World Resources Institute.

In its action plan for the Paris COP21 meet, India pledges to reduce its carbon intensity—a measure of a country’s emissions relative to its economic output—by 35% by 2030. From: phys.org

GR: Taking a long view of developments in India, one can see that from a bright beginning in 1950, the country has descended through failure after failure. Population control has failed, living standards (health and wealth) are extremely imbalanced, and wildlife and its habitats are disappearing. As climate change adds to the other human impacts, farming will fall farther and farther behind the needs of the swelling population. By 2040 or so when emigration becomes necessary, Europe, Russia, and China will have become fortresses. Where will the people go? And we have to ask, was it all worth it? Did the urge to reproduce have to be satisfied at the cost of all else?

Some wild animals more tolerant of human interaction than others

Posted on November 17, 2015 by GarryRogers

Wild Mallards

Bird Photos

Flower Photos

“The researchers’ findings could ultimately help shape wildlife conservation practices. The paper notes, for example, that protecting smaller birds might be more dependent on creating environments that reduce human disturbance. The paper also suggested that ecotourism—which has been said to be dangerous to animal species in general—might be less harmful to larger birds than previously thought because larger animals are more likely to be able to tolerate human disturbance.” From: phys.org

GR: Outdoor recreation, including ecotourism, and eco-education, is one of largest human impacts on nature. Researchers have repeatedly shown that human presence is harmful to birds. The study reported in this article found that ecotourism is less harmful to larger birds. It didn’t find that ecotourism was not harmful at all.