PersianPaladin

James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change | Environment | The Guardian ‎"I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while." Oh shut up you clueless old eco-fascist.

A county veterinarian has speculated that the dead birds that fell from the sky in central Sweden on Tuesday may have been frightened by fireworks, then run over by a car after landing on the road in the dark. http://www.thelocal.se/31262/20110105/ a search of USGS records shows there have been 16 events in the past 30 years involving blackbirds where at least 1,000 of the birds have died seemingly all at once. “These large events do take place,†he said. “It’s not terribly unusual.†http://www.2theadvoc.../112843019.html

AN estimated 500 red-winged blackbirds and starlings have been found dead in Louisiana, a local newspaper reports - just a few days and a short distance away from where thousands more plummeted to their death in Arkansas. A LIST of LOCATIONS that have FALLING BIRDS and DEAD FISH in 2011 (yes, I know it's a CT site...but they do link mainstream news sources) Maybe there is a simple explanation?

Some notable convection occurred in the Irish Sea from the late November event:- http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=69266671&postcount=2564

I've been monitoring the skies over the North Sea for the past few weeks during these cold spells lately, and I've noticed some pretty notable convective clouds on occasion which suggest that some of the convection has approached the mature-thunderstorm level. An example:- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dkohara/831694552/#/photos/dkohara/831694552/lightbox/ Normally in thunder-snow synoptics, I usually don't expect convection to exceed the cumulonimbus calvus tropospheric depth:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulonimbus_calvus For the most part on the North Sea coasts; we most likely see moderate-depth convection in north-easterly or easterly set-ups. Lightning can occur from calvus clouds, but I'm presuming that we've also had cumolonimbus capillatus which is almost approaching the classic anvil-shaped thunder-cloud. I don't clearly recall any cumulonimbus incus clouds during thunder-snow set-up's for many years; and was wondering if convection at that height is even possible in these thunder-snow set-up's (assuming a difference between sea temperature and 850hpa temperature greater than 14C).

Current observational tools cannot account for roughly half of the heat that is believed to have built up on Earth in recent years, according to a "Perspectives" article in this week's issue of Science. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) warn in the new study that satellite sensors, ocean floats, and other instruments are inadequate to track this "missing" heat, which may be building up in the deep oceans or elsewhere in the climate system. http://www.physorg.com/news190558013.html

Perhaps a (preferably non-nuclear) destruction of our global industrial civilization could give our children a fighting chance to inherit a more livable future after the dust of instability settles. Wars may end up killing a lot of people; but the brutal reality is that climate change catastrophe could kill every man, woman and child on planet earth. It's that brutal.

lol

If we want to avoid global climate catastrophe....we have to end all economic growth worldwide. http://seekingalpha.com/article/239642-the-political-economy-of-climate-change Maybe it's high time to close the Strait of Hormuz. Permanently.

Only an economic "catastrophe" will save us from Climate Change Catastrophe. http://hozturner.blogspot.com/2010/11/climate-change-catastrophe-not-quite.html

If the global average temperature increases from the present 0.8 C to two degrees C, as seems likely, the entire Arctic region will warm at least four to six degrees and possibly eight degrees due to a series of processes and feedbacks called Arctic amplification. A similar feverish rise in our body temperatures would put us in hospital if it didn't kill us outright. "I hate to say it but I think we are committed to a four- to six-degree warmer Arctic," Serreze said. If the Arctic becomes six degrees warmer, then half of the world's permafrost will likely thaw, probably to a depth of a few metres, releasing most of the carbon and methane accumulated there over thousands of years, said Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and a world expert on permafrost. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52896

An interesting article on The Oil Drum concludes that initial estimates of methane hydrates in offshore deep-water drilling locations have been inflated (and we still have incomplete data on hydrate occurrences). http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5552 I don't know anything about this specialised subject area, so perhaps SS could explain this to me. Seems the experts are more worried about the permafrost methane than those that reside in the ocean.

Why did the computer models fail to predict the cooling from 2006 onwards? http://online.wsj.com/video/climate-models-fail-to-predict-temperature-drop/6E28205E-E862-4BBE-A65D-DE5391D13BAF.html

Haha...interesting find.

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 20, 2010 (IPS) - The carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have melted the Arctic sea ice to its lowest volume since before the rise of human civilisation, dangerously upsetting the energy balance of the entire planet, climate scientists are reporting. "The Arctic sea ice has reached its four lowest summer extents (area covered) in the last four years," said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the U.S. city of Boulder, Colorado. The volume - extent and thickness - of ice left in the Arctic likely reached the lowest ever level this month, Serreze told IPS. "I stand by my previous statements that the Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It's not going to recover," he said. There can be no recovery because tremendous amounts of extra heat are added every summer to the region as more than 2.5 million square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean have been opened up to the heat of the 24-hour summer sun. A warmer Arctic Ocean not only takes much longer to re-freeze, it emits huge volumes of additional heat energy into the atmosphere, disrupting the weather patterns of the northern hemisphere, scientists have now confirmed. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52896

This is an article from RealClimate that is well worth a read when it comes to the methane issue. I quote:- "For methane to be a game-changer in the future of Earth’s climate, it would have to degas to the atmosphere catastrophically, on a time scale that is faster than the decadal lifetime of methane in the air. So far no one has seen or proposed a mechanism to make that happen." http://www.realclima...ne-on-the-move/

Thanks for your input.

The melting of methane hydrates are potentially very dangerous. I admit it. They could turn a 2-3C global average rise into something much worse (given feed-back mechanisms). I read they have an atmospheric half-life of 10-12 years. CO2 has a half-life of about a century. Perhaps it would be better if we just nuked all of the Arctic and sub-arctic permafrost and get it over and done with now - rather than let it gradually bleed out and exarcebate things long-term? Is that a bit mad? lol

Having done a bit of research on the relationship between Peak Oil and Climate Change; I've come to learn that the "worst-case scenarios" projected by the IPCC are unlikely to come to fruition. Why? They make assumptions about large-scale growth in resource-extraction without thoroughly consulting relevant studies. They appear to operate in a vacuum and assume that human ingenuity will somehow substitute declining oil with different forms of natural-gas, liquified-coal, shale gas, and other carbon fuels (via greater technologies). But recent reports refute that idea. For example, the world faces peak coal in 2011 according to this study. This article states (by a physics professor at Uppsala University):- "Our conclusion is that the assumptions of coal use that the IPCC recommended that climate researchers refer to in calculating their future horror scenarios are completely unrealistic. The question is why at all these gigantic volumes of carbon dioxide emission are to be found among the possible scenarios. The IPCC bears a great responsibility for the fact that thousands of climate researchers around the world have dedicated years of research to calculating temperature increases for scenarios that are completely unrealistic." Read the article here. There is also an interesting piece written here on the Energy Bulletin blog of the Post-Carbon Institute; concerning the projected "businss as usual" scenario in a world of Peak Oil. A quote from the piece:- "In all BAU scenarios, it is presumed that energy technology (coal-to-liquids, biofuels, electric cars, any or all of these) will seamlessly step up to replace oil as the need arises. This assumption is not yet proven, and it appears to be tragically unrealistic." Then there was this recent study by UC Davis:- WASHINGTON (AFP) – The world will run out of oil around 100 years before replacement energy sources are available, if oil use and development of new fuels continue at the current pace, a US study warns. Researchers at the University of California, Davis (UC-Davis) used the current share prices of oil companies and alternative energy companies to predict when replacement fuels will be ready to fill the gap left when oil runs dry. And the study's findings weren't very good for the oil-hungry world. If the world's oil reserves were the 1.332 trillion barrels estimated in 2008 and oil consumption stood at 85.22 million barrels a day and growing yearly at 1.3 percent, oil would be depleted by 2041, says the study published online last week by Environmental Science and Technology. If you look back to those Met Office projections of carbon-increases; they contradict the International Energy Agency 2010 report concerning growth. According to the 25-year forecast in the IEA's latest annual World Energy Outlook, the most likely scenario is for crude oil production to stay on a plateau at about 68 to 69 million barrels per day. In this scenario, crude oil production "never regains its all-time peak of 70 million barrels per day reached in 2006," said IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2010. Source There was also an interesting critique of the IEA outlook written here. I still think we face a hostile future in the coming decades. Many places are likely to become badly affected by higher temperatures with my estimate of global average increases of between 2-3.5C (rather than 5C and above). Triple-digit oil prices and demand-destruction, etc will likely contract the GDP of industrial nations by a large amount.

This recent piece by ClimateProgress is the most depressing, doom-mongering collection of information\studies I've ever read. Read it and weep.

I've been brought down to the earth by a 20mph gust before... mind you...I think that was down to a door being slammed in my face.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1324859/Al-Gore-left-car-engine-running-hour-long-environmental-lecture.html lol

I'd say that's an accurate assessment from what I've seen over the years.