On 27 and 28 September 2017, eight large rockfalls occurred from the southeast face of El Capitan. These rockfalls resulted in one fatality and two serious injuries, and spurred a complicated rescue and temporary closure of the main road exiting Yosemite Valley. In order to manage these challenging events, the National Park Service (NPS) had a critical, immediate need for quantitative information about the sequence of rockfalls and the potential for additional activity.
Using new “structure-from-motion” photogrammetry techniques in conjunction with baseline laser-scanning data, scientists from the NPS, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland rapidly analyzed these rockfalls. By comparing 3-dimensional (3D) models of the cliff before, during, and after the rockfalls, the researchers were able to pinpoint the exact locations, dimensions, and volumes of the rockfalls, along with the spatial and temporal pattern of their progression up the cliff.
James Hansen issued dire warnings in the summer of 1988. Today earth is only modestly warmer.
What about Mr. Hansen’s other claims? Outside the warming models, his only explicit claim in the testimony was that the late ’80s and ’90s would see “greater than average warming in the southeast U.S. and the Midwest.” No such spike has been measured in these regions.
As observed temperatures diverged over the years from his predictions, Mr. Hansen doubled down. In a 2007 case on auto emissions, he stated in his deposition that most of Greenland’s ice would soon melt, raising sea levels 23 feet over the course of 100 years. Subsequent research published in Nature magazine on the history of Greenland’s ice cap demonstrated this to be impossible.
* Most of the plastic waste comes from just a few countries, mostly in Asia and Africa.
* 25% is “leakage” from Asian waste management processes — the rest is waste that has never been collected, but is simply thrown into rivers.
* But European countries ship inject huge quantities of waste into Asian waste management streams, ostensibly for recycling. As much as 20% — millions of tons every year — ends up in the oceans and will continue to do so.
* Since the Chinese banned waste imports at the start of the year, shipments have been diverted to other Asian countries with even weaker environmental controls (Figure 1).
* EU recycling is therefore a major contributor to marine waste and increasing recycling will therefore simply increase marine litter.
Dr Peter Ridd has taken James Cook University to court protesting his sacking for what he says is, primarily, speaking-out about the lack of quality assurance in Great Barrier Reef science.
Dr Ridd spoke out initially about there being no quality assurance of Great Barrier Reef science – science that is arguably misused to secure billions of dollars of tax-payer funding. When the University tried to stop Dr Ridd doing this, Dr Ridd spoke out against University management – making all the documentation public including on his new website.
Energy access is the “golden thread” that weaves together economic growth, human development and environmental sustainability. The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, and the adoption of SDG 7.1 specifically – the goal to ensure access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy for all by 2030 – established a new level of political recognition for energy’s central role in development.
Improvements in technologies are offering new opportunities for making significant progress on the SDG goal on electricity access. The combination of declining costs for solar and decentralised solutions, cheaper and more efficient lighting and appliances, and new business models making use of digital, mobile-enabled platforms has increased the number of available solutions to cater to those currently without electricity access. But many challenges remain, particularly for clean cooking.
The main findings show that population growth and changes in our consumption patterns put unprecedented pressure on the planet’s natural resources:
Over 75% of the Earth’s land area is already degraded, and over 90% could become degraded by 2050.
Globally, a total area half of the size of the European Union (4.18 million km²) is degraded annually, with Africa and Asia being the most affected.
The economic cost of soil degradation for the EU is estimated to be in the order of tens of billions of euros annually.
Land degradation and climate change are estimated to lead to a reduction of global crop yields by about 10% by 2050. Most of this will occur in India, China and sub-Saharan Africa, where land degradation could halve crop production.
As a consequence of accelerated deforestation it will become more difficult to mitigate the effects of climate change
By 2050, up to 700 million people are estimated to have been displaced due to issues linked to scarce land resources. The figure could reach up to 10 billion by the end of this century.
Not a single EU state is meeting its climate targets, a new analysis by CAN Europe finds.
It’s been close to three years since countries worldwide signed the Paris Agreement, which obligates nations pledge to commit themselves to intending (or something like that) to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in order to “safeguard the planet’s future”.
The language of the Agreement is in fact non-binding, and so one wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some signatories might not be living up to the agreement’s spirit.
Richard Siegmund Lindzen is an American atmospheric physicist known for his work in the dynamics of the atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books. From 1983 until his retirement in 2013, he was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a lead author of Chapter 7, “Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks,” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report on climate change. He has criticized the scientific consensus about climate change and what he has called “climate alarmism.”
After half a billion million years of climate change, I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, that life on Earth (and specifically corals) have so many ways to cope with the climate changing. After all, it’s natural (if you are trained by Greenpeace) to assume that corals can only survive in a world with one constant stable temperature just like they never had.
One more tool in the coral-reef-workshop
Corals don’t just have a tool-box, they have a Home Depot Warehouse. h/t to GWPF
On June 8th, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) made its first official announcement via press release that 12 big Northern California wildfires in October 2017 were caused by problems associated with electric utility power lines.
The October 2017 Fire Siege involved more than 170 fires and burned at least 245,000 acres in Northern California. About 11,000 firefighters from 17 states and Australia helped battle the blazes. They concluded that 12 Wildfires in Mendocino, Humboldt, Butte, Sonoma, Lake, and Napa Counties were caused by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) “power and distribution lines, conductors and the failure of power poles.”
The words “global warming” and “climate change” were conspicuously absent from the announcement even…
Trois révolutions énergétiques depuis à peine plus d’un siècle. Nous sommes entrés dans la troisième révolution énergétique. La première vit le jour avec la machine à vapeur et participa à l’essor du charbon, avec la seconde le moteur thermique dérôna le charbon au profit des hydrocarbures, et la troisième révolution industrielle, en cours, est technologique et basée sur les énergies ‘vertes’ ou énergies intermittentes et l’informatique ou le numérique. Cette problématique vient d’être abordée dans un excellent ouvrage paru en 2018 .
Peut-on dire que cette progression récente suivant ces trois phases majeures de la technologie s’est effectuée dans le sens d’un meilleur respect de l‘état de la Planète. Bien que cela soit le discours officiel, rien n’en est moins sûr. Pourquoi ? Tout simplement par le méconnaissance de tout un chacun à comprendre ou savoir ce qui est réellement utilisé dans les énergies vertes et numériques. L’actuelle ‘transition énergétique’ a bon dos et elle a toutes les vertus, elle est propre, quant aux les hydrocarbures, le charbon, l’uranium et CO2 (ennemi n° 1) ils ont tous les maux, et sont tous sales. Il n’est pas un jour où cette opposition nous est rappelée…
Voici quelques réflexions sur la théorie de l’acidification des océans. Selon cette théorie, le pH des océans diminuerait inlassablement, en raison du CO2 qui ne cesse de s’accumuler dans l’atmosphère.
• Les mesures directes de pH sont récentes et nous n’avons aucun recul. Selon les médias et les ONG écologistes, qui se basent sur le GIEC et sur certaines publications (e.g., Caldeira & Wickett 2003), le pH des océans aurait été de 8.25 en 1750. Cependant, il faut savoir que personne n’a jamais mesuré le pH des océans en 1750, puisque le concept de pH n’a été inventé qu’en 1909 (par le danois Søren P.L. Sørensen), et que les premiers appareils fiables pour mesurer le pH ne sont apparus qu’en 1924… Nous ne sommes donc pas certains de cette valeur de 8.25 pour 1750… La valeur de 8.25 est donc obtenue par des mesures indirectes et n’est donc pas certaine.
• A l’heure d’aujourd’hui, tous les pH sont possibles. Lorsqu’on dit que les océans actuels sont à un pH de 8.1, de quel océan parle-t-on? S’agit-il du pH moyen global? Si c’est de cela qu’on parle, quelle est l’incertitude sur la mesure? (i.e., l’écart-type?). Ceci n’est jamais indiqué. Il faut savoir que si l’on prend un jour de la semaine, tous les pH sont possibles dans les océans, comme l’illustre très bien la figure suivante.
When if comes to debunking Gorebal Warming, Chicken Little of the Sea (“ocean acidification”) and other Warmunist myths, my favorite starting points are my old college textbooks.
Way back in the Pleistocene (spring semester 1979) in Marine Science I, our professor, Robert Radulski, assigned us The Oceans by Sverdrup (yes, that Sverdrup), Johnson and Fleming. Even though it was published in 1942, it was (and may still be) considered the definitive oceanography textbook. I looked up “ocean acidification” in the index… It wasn’t there.
The notion that CO2 partial pressure influences the pH of seawater isn’t a new concept, *surely* ocean acidification must have been mentioned in at least one of my college textbooks.
A small asteroid hit Earth on Saturday, June 2nd, exploding in the atmosphere over Botswana before it could reach the ground. The Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona had discovered the space rock only hours earlier as it hurtled toward our planet from inside the orbit of the Moon. Sensors used to monitor rogue nuclear explosions detected the asteroid and estimated its yield near ~500 tons of TNT.
SPOTLIGHT: Whether the predictions in Paul Ehrlich’s 50-year-old bestseller, The Population Bomb, were right or wrong matters. Because scientists and environmentalists continue to follow in his footsteps.
BIG PICTURE: Ehrlich is an important case study. His conviction that humanity is a blight on the planet is shared by many ordinary people, as well as by many influential ones (…)
BIG PICTURE: The Population Bomb was first published in May 1968 – 50 years ago this month. Page one of my copy, printed in 1970, describes its author as “a qualified scientist.” The back cover provides further detail: (…)
Al Gore wrote in the Huffington Post (August 28, 2014) that the need for “bold action” to curtail “old dirty sources of energy … is obvious and urgent.” The proper scientific response to an assertion like that is why? How can I test this idea? Science is not a belief, it is a method of testing ideas. We use an idea to make predictions and then we gather data to see if the predictions are correct. If the predictions are accurate, the idea survives. If any of the predictions fail, the idea is disproven, and it must be modified or simply rejected.
Thanks to GWPF for publishing posthumously Bill Gray’s understanding of global warming/climate change. The paper was compiled at his request, completed and now available as Flaws in applying greenhouse warming to Climate Variability This post provides some excerpts in italics with my bolds and some headers. Readers will learn much from the entire document (title above is link to pdf).
The Fundamental Correction
The critical argument that is made by many in the global climate modeling (GCM) community is that an increase in CO2 warming leads to an increase in atmospheric water vapor, resulting in more warming from the absorption of outgoing infrared radiation (IR) by the water vapor (…)
Figure 14: Global surface temperature change since 1880. The dotted blue and dotted red lines illustrate how much error one would have made by extrapolating a multi-decadal cooling or warming trend beyond a typical 25-35 year period. Note the recent 1975-2000 warming trend has not continued, and the global temperature remained relatively constant until 2014.
by M. Shellenberger, President, Env. Progr., May 16, 2018 in WUWT
Over the last year, the media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines.
People who read these stories are understandably left with the impression that the more solar and wind energy we produce, the lower electricity prices will become.
And yet that’s not what’s happening. In fact, it’s the opposite.
Puna Geothermal Venture has removed 60,000 gallons of flammable Pentane from a geothermal plant in the path of the Hawaii volcanic eruption. But concerns remain that if the geothermal wells break, they could flood the neighbourhood with toxic volcanic gasses.
(…)
Kilauea eastern rift zone fissure eruption May 2018. By United States Geological Survey [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Eurostat estimates that in 2017 carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuel combustion increased by 1.8% in the European Union (EU), compared with the previous year. CO2 emissions are a major contributor to global warming and account for around 80% of all EU greenhouse gas emissions. They are influenced by factors such as climate conditions, economic growth, size of the population, transport and industrial activities.
It should also be noted that imports and exports of energy products have an impact on CO2 emissions in the country where fossil fuels are burned: for example if coal is imported this leads to an increase in emissions, while if electricity is imported, it has no direct effect on emissions in the importing country, as these would be reported in the exporting country where it is produced.
This information on early estimates of CO2 emissions from energy use for 2017 is published by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union.
Largest falls in CO2 emissions in Finland and Denmark, highest increases in Malta and Estonia
According to Eurostat estimates, CO2 emissions rose in 2017 in a majority of EU Member States, with the highest increase being recorded in Malta (+12.8%), followed by Estonia (+11.3%), Bulgaria (+8.3%) Spain (+7.4%) andPortugal (+7.3%). Decreases were registered in seven Member States: Finland (-5.9%), Denmark (-5.8%), theUnited Kingdom (-3.2%), Ireland (-2.9%), Belgium (-2.4%), Latvia (-0.7%) and Germany (-0.2%)..
The report (.pdf, 11 pages), by eminent epidemiologist Mikko Paunio, says that international bodies and NGOs are trying to prevent poor countries from expanding their use of conventional fuels, have abandoned the so-called “energy ladder” — the gradual shift to cleaner types of fuel that underpinned the clean up of air quality in industrialised nations.
As Dr Paunio explains, this will have devastating consequences:
“Indoor air pollution from domestic fires kills millions every year. But instead of helping poor people to climb the energy ladder and clean the air in their communities, the poorest people are being given gimmicks like cookstoves, which make little difference to air quality, and solar panels, which are little more than a joke.”
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
