A lyrical video of an American Citizen who returned to his Ethiopian roots and started a miracle.
The new “Climate crock of the week” shows the dangerous irrationality and ugly views that the denialosphere is now resorting to. As if lies and chicanery were not enough, have a look at Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and Marc Morano in full flow (towards the end of the video). Also enjoy the Monty Python witch trial. Remember that US Senator Inhofe has called for 17 top climate scientists to be prosecuted. Inhofe is shaping up very rapidly as a new Joseph McCarthy - infamous for witch hunt type trials in the fifties.
Here below is a more detailed look at another piece of misrepresentation by the denialosphere. They’ve been fond of claiming “it’s the sun, stupid” for ages because the idea is very plausible and misleading to the general public. A few months a move was made to change this to “it’s El Nino, stupid”. Uber-denier “scientist” Bob Carter was co-author of this (2009) paper which he and his fellows claim showed that the SOI (southern ocean oscillation index - El Nino etc) correlated very well with the variation in temperatures seen over periods of a few years. So far, so obvious so good. El Nino does have a big effect. However, by clever statistical manipulation, they had removed any temperature trends from the data used for their graphs (trends show any long term consistent warming or cooling) leaving only the variability, which then (unsurprisingly) correlated very well with the SOI. Where they went off the straight and narrow, and amazingly, the peer review process didn’t pick them up, was to go on to claim that:
According to one of its authors, Bob Carter, the paper found that the "close relationship between ENSO and global temperature, as described in the paper, leaves little room for any warming driven by human carbon dioxide emissions".
This is where they “jumped the shark” and where Carter ended up spouting the area of belief that he consistently does. The problem with the paper was the big fat “mistake” shown in this devastating criticism.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/peer-reviewed-response-to-McLean-El-Nino-paper.html
What the authors had done is similar to if you were examining the temperature of your house over a year and ignored the influence of spring, summer, autumn and winter on general temperatures by subtracting them from the household figures and only looked at temperature changes (variations) induced when you put the central heating on. Then they claimed that your house temperatures correlate very strongly with your central heating and there was “little room for any warming driven by” the influence of the seasons!
Rising greenhouse gas levels are not “just” a threat to the climate, food supplies, habitats etc. Elevated levels of CO2 are dissolving in the oceans and are acidifying them. Normally, the ocean is slightly alkaline but it is getting less so due to our excess emissions. Some might argue that if the seas are absorbing CO2 then we don’t have to reduce fossil fuel use. The problem is that even with this effect, we are still “gaining” – the Earth’s systems can absorb a certain amount of emissions of CO2 per year but, on top of the natural emissions, we are adding sufficient extra CO2 to overwhelm the Earth’s ability to absorb it – that is why CO2 levels in the atmosphere are steadily rising.
The oceans currently are acting as a partial buffer to our emissions but buffering solutions (seawater in this case) only work for a while before approaching saturation. As this starts to happen, the oceans will slow in their ability to absorb CO2 and, at that point, if we have not reduced our emissions, there will be a steepening rise in the amount of CO2 building up in the atmosphere, leading to an increasing boost (a positive feedback) to the greenhouse effect boost. This won’t be a runaway feedback, because the greenhouse potential of CO2 reduces logarithmically as the concentration increases, but it still won’t be a good thing.
Ocean acidication is an astonishing long term threat that has been getting very little publicity. The professional video at the end of this blog is an attempt to rectify that. Here’s an article about acidification which paints a worrying picture. Here’s a link to a scientific paper in Nature. Here’s the Wikipedia article about it.
If we continue on our current emissions path without drastically reducing our use of fossil fuels, the oceans will steadily get more acidic over the next couple of hundred years.The problem with this is that many of the smallest organisms in the sea, such as plankton, which form the basis of the oceanic food chain, have shells or other structures that are vulnerable to increased acid in sea water. There are few tipping points known for certain in climate/Earth science. One of them in prehistory is when CO2 reached about 1000 ppm leading to an “anoxic event”. In the Permian-Triassic era (250 million years ago) mass die off of species, up to 96 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrate species became extinct; it was the only known mass extinction of insects. Fifty-seven percent of all families and 83% of all genera were killed. There are various reasons posited for this event but a strong contender is hypercapnia (too much CO2) which causes anoxic events.
Methane release, from when permafrost melts and releases its stored CO2 and methane, gives a large boost to the greenhouse effect. Methane however is a relatively short lived gas in the atmosphere – it ends up being oxidised to CO2. A worse situation would be the release of methane clathrates from under the sea bed – a so-called “clathrate gun”. Clathrates are “condensed” methane held in a sort of waxy ice which is stable only because it is cold and under great pressure at the bottom of the sea. Warm it up or remove the pressure and it bubbles up as the powerful greenhouse gas methane. Gas releases from undersea methane clathrate deposits have caused a sudden powerful excess greenhouse effect which was thought to be responsible for mass species extinctions in the past, like those referenced above
Here’s a 21 minute video from the NRDC, narrated by Sigourney Weaver, about the increasing acidification of the oceans - which is happening right now. As I said at the beginning, it’s an under-reported consequence of increasing carbon dioxide levels specifically, as opposed to general greenhouse gases.
It’s worth double clicking on the headline link to go directly to Youtube rather than watching it on the embedded player because the film is quite beautiful too and worth watching large.
Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification
Last Saturday, 5 J-CAN members planted about 30 willow cuttings each to form a new hedge at Brian Adair's organic farm at Sion.
Brian got the 200-odd cuttings from Alcindo Pinto, who's "The Man" to supply you if you want to grow your own Wicker Man to sacrifice some climate change denialists in. We were half expecting that Edward Woodward would turn up, but… Edward Woodward wouldn't. (read that last sentence out loud).
As I’ve pointed out before we are only supposed to have the equivalent of 61 trees each for our lifetime, worked out by the total number of trees in the world divided by global population. Although willow hedging probably doesn’t “count” as a full tree, it was nice to know that we had each planted enough to approximately add an extra 50 % to our personal global tree tally.
After we finished this community action, we retired to Brian’s office/shed for some warming and highly spiced organic parsnip soup and French bread and some of Maria Barnicoat’s chocolate dipped soul food to finish. Probably it was because we were glowing with that warmth that you get when you work hard outside in cold weather, but it all tasted incredibly good.
Brian, who’s a leading light in the Jersey Soil Association, and the Jersey organic movement generally, started Jersey’s first accredited organic farm. He supplies the organic shop in Stopford road - he also grows around a million organic seedlings a year. Some of his plants are raised by other growers locally, who go on to supply Riverford Farm Organics with courgettes and cauliflowers. Riverford have probably the biggest and best known organic box scheme in the UK – and Jersey supplies it!
Time for fun. Speed riding uses a very small paraglider-with-skis combination that just about glides but does it at a very high speed. The point is to scream down impossibly sloped mountains, jump/flying over rocks, crevasses and obstacles. Antoine Montant, flies over a huge avalanche on the North face of Aiguille du Midi in Chamonix. This sequence has been awarded the Best P.O.V (point of view) Award in Aspen in the latest Powder Video Awards.
This image is taken from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine website via Michael Tobis' climate science blog Only in it for the Gold . It shows how meat and diary production are massively subsidised whereas vegetables and fruit are more or less ignored. 
If you read the comments sections of any climate related website or blog you will see the most outrageous assertions from the denialist peanut gallery. Inadvertently demonstrating their own gullibility and irrationality and yes, I'll use the "S" word - STUPIDITY, these people just mindlessly regurgitate the propaganda which they have swallowed. Perhaps the "smoking gun" that most shows them up as the dangerous, suckered idiots that they are, is their frequently repeated cry to show them the science and the scientific papers that prove there is such a thing as global warming, usually ending with a phrase like "you can't because there is none LMFAO - it's all a conspiracy!!!" These mindless types have read this blatant lie on denialist websites and just parrot it because they want to believe it. How irresponsible is that?"Tens of thousands of people have faked the scientific theories since the early 1800s, the actual measurements of reality, the historical records, the pre-historical records, the even further back than that records. This colossal hoax is so all pervasive that even animals, birds and insects are joining in by pretending to be affected by non-existent changes in ecosystems. God help us, the conspirators have even persuaded dumb ice sheets and permafrost to fake it for the cause. Nature really is a lying traitor and we should never trust her again!"Enjoy ten minutes of concentrated anti B.S. Crash and burn, deniers...
This video gives an overview ofthe “New Urbanism” movement that aims to counter and reverse urban sprawl. Not just because sprawl is ugly but because analysing the reasons for sprawl, and what happens if you reverse it, will give a very good grounding in sustainable thinking and future sustainable development.
The denialosphere is wallowing in an ecstacy of misinforming at the moment. Ever since the hacked/stolen/leaked emails of so-called Climategate were "liberated" they have been endlessly and deliberately misinterpreted for propaganda purposes, whilst the unfortunate scientists involved have been ruthlessly traduced. A common insinuation that the propagandists make is that the scientists were refusing to share data because they had something to hide. Here's a link to a page on RealClimate which has links to more data, methodology, computer code etc than you could shake a stick at - freely available. Hopefully, the demanding screams from the denialosphere will
