Australia's Bureau of Meteorology
We talked yesterday about 2012 being the warmest on record in the United States, and if you thought that was alarming, consider conditions in Australia (thanks to Cory Gnazzo for the heads-up).
As a record-breaking heatwave hovers over many regions and territories (which are in their summer months now), the continent's Bureau of Meteorology has added two new colors to the weather map to reflect the rising mercury.
The map currently shows the weather in orange tones at the top, which indicate temperatures 40 to 48 degrees Celsius. But forecasts are predicting off-the-charts weather. As a result, pink and purple will now cover temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius -- should it climb that high.
For those rusty on the temperature conversion, that is a sweat-inducing 122 degrees Fahrenheit.
David Jones, head of the bureau's climate monitoring and prediction unit, said the projected forecasts show temperatures "in excess of" 122 Fahrenheit.
MSNBC's Chris Hayes noted on Twitter earlier that he's noticed "a marked shift in climate denialist rhetoric" lately. Climate deniers have gone from saying, "It's not getting warmer!" to saying, "Of course it's getting warmer, we don't know the cause."
At this point, I'm almost inclined to consider this a breakthrough.
Kevin Drum had a piece a year ago that always stuck in my head.
Originally, climate denial went through three stages:
1. The world isn't warming.
2. OK, it's warming, but it's not man-made. It's just natural climate variability.
3. Fine, people are responsible. But it's not economically worth it to do anything about it.
But as the right grew more radical, and conservatives' discomfort with reality became more intense, we saw deniers regress quickly. Indeed, they not only started over, they went even further back, insisting that climate science itself is a communistic conspiracy which must be rejected in its entirety.
If the right is open to the reality of a warming planet, perhaps that's a step in the right direction?
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Not really, the other explanation is that WE non-believers need to accept G-d and come to Jesus, then all will be right with the world.....Theocracy 101
Reality 101: We need to do something like yesterday cause it's only getting warmer from here on out....
Cripes, I was too slow. I was gonna post something very similar.
Carry on!
A step in the right direction? You're kidding, right? Way too little, too late. You'd think by now there would be more self awareness, at least in this country, to address any oncoming threat or crisis by learning from the past. But, no, we're getting more stupid every day. This country should have led on this issue years ago. Europe has taken it seriously for years but not us. Now all you hear is how do we deal with the consequences? By losing agricultural regions and coastlines to start and the financial consequences will be huge. The nonbelievers in science have "won".
Exactly.
If the Obama administration cared about this, he would insist that Lisa Jackson stay on to lead EPA. We don't need a stupid confirmation fight, and at the end of months of withering debate wind up with someone far less motivated to do anything.
We have the regulations on the books- CO2 was long ago declared a pollutant. Without legislation, Obama can extract significant revenues from the Fossil fuel industry in fines. We can redirect those revenues to green infrastructure projects like switching LNG production to export it in the form of hydrogen.
Saudi America will be an enormous energy producer in the 21st century. The question is whether we export the energy with or without the CO2. We should slap enormous export duties on any energy that goes out with the CO2.
Because it is just going to wash back up on our beaches like it did in New Jersey and New York.
The pity is that a carbon tax designed to pay for carbon sequestration commensurate with production would be only $0.25 - $0.50 a gallon of gasoline, depending upon the accounting and methods used to lock up the carbon. (If you think a ~10% surcharge on gas is expensive, go visit Staten Island. Or Hoboken, or Lower Manhattan, or the Rockaways, or...)
Since many of the most affordable means of locking up carbon involve responsible management of federal lands, such as removing brush from forests and building up topsoil in grasslands, the tax would yield tremendous economic benefits over time. Healthier forests make sustainable timber harvests more profitable, thicker and richer topsoil helps farming and ranching, and so on.
Billions of dollars.
That's become the standard cost of cleaning up after just one of these extreme storms, the hurricanes, the tornadoes, the flooding events, as well as drought and it's side-effects, which have taken place across the US in recent years.
Will we as a nation be able to continue funding such large scale clean up efforts, as storms increase in size and frequency? No, and why should we?
The pollutants causing the problems, where are they coming from?
The persons responsible for generating the environmental issues are not footing the bill for the clean up after these weather events. The deniers are those who seek to avoid the price of changing their environmental practices, and are perfectly willing to stand by as the tax payers, devastated communities, and affected individuals continue to foot the bill.
The bill for clean up surpasses the proportional costs of change in business and utility environmental impact management. But they won't spend the money to change their polluting, they spend it on lobbiests to kill the EPA and get current environmental protection laws off the books.
These people aren't deniers, they're just staving off paying for what they've sown.
Humans have mucked this planet up drastically. It is questionable if there is a moral justification for the continued existence of the human race. Even if it takes a few more centuries for humans to complete the job of destroying the capability of this planet supporting human life, other life will continue and the health of the planet will eventually recover. Hopefully, the next 'intelligent' species to dominate the planet will have a morality beyond self-centered greed.
The sad thing is that all the decent, honorable species (ever have an "animal" lie to you, cheat you, rob you, try to kill you other than in self defense?) will have to die while nature's failed experiment in creating biological intelligence that can foresee the results of its actions, and modify its behavior as a result, goes extinct this century.
.
Global warming/climate change is too large of a concept for many to wrap their minds around. Deniers know it's getting warmer and the poles are melting but they can't fight what they can't see and become frustrated, thus denying is a simpler venue for relief and justification. Sort of like believing in supply-side economics for thirty years and refusing to acknowledge that most everyone got screwed. There's no changing their minds so let them feel the heat of reality's baptism every summer to come.
I agree that we have totally screwed up the planet now, and that we will be living with the consequences for at least the next 1000 years, according to the climate scientists....unless we continue pumping more CO2 into the air. In that case, we simply die...or at least a sizeable portion of humanity does. As bad as things are, they are getting worse faster than even the most pessimistic computer models had predicted. There are now signs that methane is beginning to enter the atmosphere from the ocean, where there are huge deposits sitting in solid form on the bottom in many locations. Methane is a greenhouse gas 20 times more effective than CO2. More and more, I'm glad I will be long gone before we see the worst of this. Unfortunately, my kids will watch the whole sorry mess kill the world, and they will curse the preceding generations that created it and refused to admit it and stop it until it was too late.
Not to mention all the methane in the melting permafrost of the Tundra.
I'm afraid a chain reaction has started which we will not be able to stop. I think this may be called "feed-back loops." An example of which has been pointed out above by Uffdaguy and TCinLA, the escaping methane from the oceans and perma frost.
Our children and grandchildren will curse us for this.
Chris' observation of a shift to "not happening" to "happening but cause(s) unknown is accurate but it isn't so recent as his comment might suggest. Bush, while still in the WH, accepted that GW was real and even that humans were possibly complicit. And prior to that by some years were precedents to GWB's statement but forwarding the claim that the economic costs of doing anything about the problem would outweigh benefits accruing. That claim is still being made and I expect we'll see it gain in popularity as citizen consensus grows on the reality of GW.
...and now that I complete reading the post, I see Kevin Drum is quoted laying out the phases we've seen the denial camp make. Sorry about that.
Denying climate change fits in with their larger anti-science stance. Plus if Democrats want to do something about it, they just have to oppose it; if they don't then it looks like Democrats might have some reasonable ideas and if they do about this, maybe they're reasonable about other things - it's better for them to be deniers and make the Democrats look stupid for believing scientists (with agendas). Similarly they need to make the scientists look bad, otherwise their base may learn that the scientists are actually right about other things (evolution, age of the earth, women's reproductive issues, studies that show that conservatives have lower IQs, etc.).
Then there's Kevin Drum's #3 above: "But it's not economically worth it to do anything about it." As with most things that cause us to question the intelligence of Republicans, it's not really ignorance about an issue but about what is self-serving for them. They don't want more regulation (because it will hurt job creators, or more to the point, the short term bottom line for some industries). That and while environmentalists bemoan the melting of the polar ice caps, there are some people (the ones created by incorporation) that are salivating at the prospect of new shipping lanes being opened and expanding oil exploration in the arctic.
Amazing how these hypocrites pretend to care about the amount of debt left to our grandchildren but don't care about the condition of the planet that's left to them.
If we who believe in climate change are wrong, but we do all we can to mitigate it, what's the down side? We've spent money we didn't have to spend -- done every day millions of times around the world and called taking out insurance. If they, who don't believe climate change is real or man-made are wrong and we fail to do all we can to mitigate it, what's the down side? The end of the human race, as well as a great deal of other life on earth. I rest my case.
If we who believe in climate change are wrong, but we do all we can to mitigate it, what's the down side?
Well, then in that case the big coal and oil exporters will lose money because we'll be saving it on lower-cost (long-term) energy sources, which will do nice things for our economy when the demand for oil exceeds the supply (in the next couple of years according to the DoD).
Anyone remember the newsreel that begins Mad Max?
Three points - they might be kind of picky but I'll raise them anyway.
1. "Climate Change" is a term invented by Frank Luntz to soften the impact of the term "Global Warming". It's an intentionally more benign term. I wish people would not use this term.
2. The way I deal with folks that don't acknowledge the reality of global warming being caused by human activity is to treat them with contempt and derision. I treat them with the same contempt I would treat someone that believes the Earth is flat. I never try to convince them - I mock them for their stupidity.
3. Also, I never use the term I "believe" in global warming. It's not a belief. I don't believe the Earth is round - I know it's round. I don't have to believe the sun rises in the east I know the sun rises in the east. It's not a matter of faith - it's reality. Those that don't acknowledge the reality of global warming caused by human activity don't live in the real world - they live in fantasyland.
I am aware of the origin of the term "climate change," but I think that it has actually turned out to be useful. Global warming is an accurate description of the mechanism, but not the effect. When we always used the term global warming, I would have reasonable people say "a little warming might not be so bad," because the obvious interpretation was that you'd have the weather that people a little further south did (not to mention the inevitable "look, we had a blizzard -- how's that global warming going, har, har!") "Climate change" easily accommodates more powerful storms, blizzards, droughts, etc., and encourages people to think about them.
Luntz isn't always a genius, and I think this one backfired on him.
I don't know of anyone who responds well to "contempt and derision". Getting more people to accept climate change is the goal, not winning pithy little internet scrums.
Lebowsky - you're back with your usual advice of catering to wingnuts - in pithy internet scrum format I might add.
I'm not trying to convince them. I want them to be as embarrassed to express that goofball viewpoint as they would be expressing the view that the earth is flat. Maybe then they'll shut up and the rest of us can get on with it.
As usual I'll leave the last word to someone that truly lives to have the last word - you.
This is bad, guys. The light purple blotch of 122+ degrees Fahrenheit is bigger than Ohio and Indiana combined. These people will not be buying heating oil pumped out of our fracking wells.
I keep saying that (not here, but elsewhere) that if we don't get a handle on this and on this soon, we're history. Life on this planet is seriously being threatened. In short, if we don't fix this, we're all gonna die.
Iran's Lut Desert holds the record for the hottest place on land. Temperatures there reach 159 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, no known species is able to survive.
There's not many animals on earth that can survive temperatures of 130 degrees. Human beings included.
There is no other issue that is more important than this. This is life and death. If we don't stay focused on that, we're doomed.
Put a bit more concretely, look at your grandchildren. OK, you're looking at the end of the line. What we're doing today will kill them tomorrow.
When I first heard of global warming, I thought it would hit hard, toward the end of the 21st century. Try telling that to the victims of Sandy.
Americas exporting of our dirtiest manufacturing processes to “ cheaper “ developing countries will only accelerate the planets demise. Global Warming is. . .well . .global.
Perhaps this was the original reason for outsourcing? Shortly followed behind by pure greed and breaking unions. In the conservatives' haste in solving "their" problems they have created the ultimate problem for Mankind. Wow, these guys are actually good at something....which is bad for everyone and everything else.
Normal climate change.....get over it.
I love map time. But when a symbology gradient has to be expanded past long anticipated climate trends, it's a little stunning. Uff may be correct. Well... shall we prepare? Or party like it's not gonna be OUR 2099?