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Environmental News

Discussion in 'Environmental Discussion' started by tochatihu, Oct 22, 2015.

  1. hill

    hill High Fiber Member

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    I thought I'd just read that the arctic Inland passage is not yet ice free this summer. For whatever it's worth
     
  2. bwilson4web

    bwilson4web BMW i3 and Model 3

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    The minimum Arctic sea ice usually occurs the middle of September. The current Arctic sea ice coverage:
    upload_2023-8-9_0-6-7.png

    The Arctic sea ice continues to melt:
    upload_2023-8-9_0-20-0.png

    Furthermore, the Greenland Ice cap is still melting:
    upload_2023-8-9_0-16-13.png

    The Arctic sea ice melt is not a smooth function but there is a trend line:
    upload_2023-8-9_0-32-5.png

    It makes more sense to look at the Arctic ice at the minimum that usually happens in about 5 weeks.

    Bob Wilson
     
    #2062 bwilson4web, Aug 9, 2023
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2023
    hill likes this.
  3. bwilson4web

    bwilson4web BMW i3 and Model 3

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    Over time, my interest in polar ice was replaced by a smoother function, sea level:
    upload_2023-8-9_0-55-9.png

    A world wide metric, it is earth's fever thermometer.

    Bob Wilson
     
    #2063 bwilson4web, Aug 9, 2023
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2023
  4. Mendel Leisk

    Mendel Leisk Senior Member

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    Maui is beset by wildfires. :cry:
     
  5. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    In these times, I look for whatever positives I can find. Like: 'beset' is a good word.
     
  6. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    ranks right up there with begat :cool:
     
  7. Mendel Leisk

    Mendel Leisk Senior Member

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  8. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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  9. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    i think 'bespoke' has made a comeback of sorts
     
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  10. Mendel Leisk

    Mendel Leisk Senior Member

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    Time for a beverage?

    But yeah, what a debacle in Lahaina. :(
     
  11. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    Having heard it earlier today in a trailer for Barbie, I'm thinking you must be right.
     
  12. vvillovv

    vvillovv Senior Member

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  13. Mendel Leisk

    Mendel Leisk Senior Member

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    For a heady moment I thought you were serious. Sadly, when you preface “good news” with “more” these days, the intent is almost invariably “bad news”.
     
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  14. bwilson4web

    bwilson4web BMW i3 and Model 3

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    Calm my friends, let @vvillovv work on a sense of humor.

    Bob Wilson
     
  15. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Maui Fires. Reporting is focused on Lahaina (city), but there have also been other fires on that island. In Lahaina, fatalities are 80 so far, 1000 people may remain unaccounted for, and number of structures destroyed approaches 300. This is a bad one, and appears unusual.

    Lahaina is in grassland, not surrounded by forests which we usually see when fires eat cities. I find previous reports of nuisance fires nearby in 2019-2022, and don't doubt others happened earlier. It has a typical dry season but unusually this time, strong low atmospheric pressure to south (distant hurricane Dora) and high pressure to north caused strong winds. This was warned in advance by weather service (apparently), but fire fighters were unprepared. And so ...

    Some Big Names are calling this a signal of Climate Change, and it may be so. If this year's dry season was particularly bad, they have a point. The setup of distant low and high pressures looks like chance bad luck to me. It seems well to realize that cities in grassland settings can also burn, not only those in forests.

    Ways to contribute towards local recovery have been well reported.
     
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  16. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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  17. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    There will soon be 2 new carbon-capture projects:

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-capture-projects-get-1-billion-in-new-federal-funding/


    Occidental's South Texas facility will use aqueous potassium hydroxide to capture CO2 from air, followed by additional steps, and then pump it underground. Into petroleum deposits where space is available because of previous removals. That seems to be the plan.


    Battelle's Project Cypress will react CO2 with basaltic rocks or magnesium oxide. They work with two companies with different processes. The former is used at Reykjavik, Iceland, the largest CO2 trapper currently I believe. The latter is suggested to eventually lower trapping costs to USD$ 50 per ton of CO2 or $180 per ton of carbon. That is among the lowest prices floating around for carbon trapping.
     
  18. Trollbait

    Trollbait It's a D&D thing

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    The US is already pumping CO2 into oil wells, though it is more to push oil out than to sequester the carbon.
     
  19. hill

    hill High Fiber Member

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    Any chance we can expect similar projects - way over in your neck of the woods? The more the merrier!
    ;)
    .
     
  20. ColoradoBoo

    ColoradoBoo Senior Member

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    Very interested article about climate scientist, Judith Curry who blew the lid off the "manufactured consensus" because the researchers are rewarded for exaggerating, and even lying, on their data in order to push the global warming agenda.
    -----------------------------------------------------------
    We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.”

    “It’s a manufactured consensus,” says climate scientist Judith Curry in my new video. She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.”

    She knows about that because she once spread alarm about climate change.

    Media loved her when she published a study that seemed to show a dramatic increase in hurricane intensity.

    “We found that the percent of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had doubled,” says Curry. “This was picked up by the media,” and then climate alarmists realized, “Oh, here is the way to do it. Tie extreme weather events to global warming!”

    “So, this hysteria is your fault!” I tell her.

    “Not really,” she smiles. “They would have picked up on it anyways.”

    But then some researchers pointed out gaps in her research — years with low levels of hurricanes.

    “Like a good scientist, I investigated,” says Curry. She realized that the critics were right. “Part of it was bad data. Part of it is natural climate variability.”

    Curry was the unusual researcher who looked at criticism of her work and actually concluded “they had a point.”

    Then the Climategate scandal taught her that other climate researchers weren’t so open-minded. Alarmist scientists’ aggressive attempts to hide data suggesting climate change is not a crisis were revealed in leaked emails.

    “Ugly things,” says Curry. “Avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests. Trying to get journal editors fired.”

    It made Curry realize that there is a “climate change industry” set up to reward alarmism.

    “The origins go back to the … U.N. environmental program,” says Curry. Some U.N. officials were motivated by “anti-capitalism. They hated the oil companies and seized on the climate change issue to move their policies along.”

    The U.N. created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

    “The IPCC wasn’t supposed to focus on any benefits of warming. The IPCC’s mandate was to look for dangerous human-caused climate change.”

    “Then the national funding agencies directed all the funding … assuming there are dangerous impacts.”

    The researchers quickly figured out that the way to get funded was to make alarmist claims about “man-made climate change.”

    This is how “manufactured consensus” happens. Even if a skeptic did get funding, it’s harder to publish because journal editors are alarmists.

    “The editor of the journal Science wrote this political rant,” says Curry. She even said, “The time for debate has ended.”

    “What kind of message does that give?” adds Curry. Then she answers her own question: “Promote the alarming papers! Don’t even send the other ones out for review. If you wanted to advance in your career, like be at a prestigious university and get a big salary, have big laboratory space, get lots of grant funding, be director of an institute, there was clearly one path to go.”

    That’s what we’ve got now: a massive government-funded climate alarmism complex.

    But Curry’s “more intense” hurricanes gave them fuel.

    “I was adopted by the environmental advocacy groups and the alarmists, and I was treated like a rock star,” Curry recounts. “Flown all over the place to meet with politicians.”

    Source: A Climate Scientist Blows The Lid Off The 'Manufactured Consensus' - Granite Grok