global warming Archives - Page 4 of 4

Helpful political observations

I shall not vote for a climate denier.

My current working theory is that people write and say amazingly silly things in the political arena, most of which I can safely ignore.

For instance, former congressman Allen West (R-FL) writes all sorts of crazy in his new book. But after listening to him long enough, I know just to tune out everything that comes from his mouth. (My friend Dan sent me this: “It’s like I always say: would you send lamb chops to recruit sheep? Then don’t send black Republicans to recruit black people.”)

There’s some silly stuff about Hillary Clinton orchestrating Vanity Fair’s article with Monica Lewinsky, the young intern who had a dalliance with Bill Clinton while he was President because she wants the piece about one of the most humiliating periods of her life dredged up again over 15 YEARS AFTER THE FACT so people can forget about it again by 2016. (Wha?)

Blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove ahave become comedy fodder for The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart.

Whereas I hear about the west Antarctic ice sheet’s collapse, which triggered a sea-level warning of about four meters (c. 13 feet) in the coming century or so, an “unstoppable” process. And Marco Rubio, another Florida Republican, decided that all those scientists that tell us that it is human activity that is in large part behind the rapid acceleration of the planet’s temperature. John Oliver explains, in NSFW language, why this is rubbish.

Since Rubio is running for President and has a good a chance as any of getting his party’s nod – 2014 poll numbers are meaningless – I need to pay attention to what he has to say. I must conclude, therefore that either 1) he believes that all this warming is from natural fluctuations, and he’s planet-threateningly wrong, or 2) he doesn’t but is saying he does because he wants to appeal to certain citizens who vote in the Republican primaries. In either case, this issue alone is enough to make me feel that he is not worthy of the office of President, and I shall not vote for him, or any other climate denier.

I have a daughter who will inherit this mess.

Dammit, Dan, I’m a librarian, not a meteorologist!

Did you know I have linked to EVERY SINGLE POST you have written?

(Title inspired by We can’t see DeForest for the trees.)

Dan from albanyweblog.com griped:
Okay Roger… How come it’s so damn hot right now?
I want a thorough answer.

Sure.

I went to Google and put in why is it so damn hot. Unfortunately, all that got me is why certain types are hot, e.g., “Why are Canadian girls so damn hot?” Or vegan girls, gingers, emo guys, biracial guys, Norwegian people, bad boys, werewolves, rugby players. And Justin Bieber. I also found the lyrics and the video to You’re So Damn Hot by OK Go.

Meanwhile, Shooting Parrots jumped in:
Ditto: why is it so damn cool in the UK? And wet. Can I feel a climate change answer coming on?

Well, for that question, I went to the only reliable source I could think of, Al Jazeera:

“As the sea ice melts at an alarming rate, the Potsdam Institute points out that the albedo (the reflectivity) over the Arctic Ocean continues to decrease and more heat is absorbed by the waters creating a positive feedback.

“As the polar winter sets in over the upper atmosphere, the warming at low levels causes instability in the atmosphere. The resulting low-pressure systems at sea level disrupt the normal circulation.

“This circulation is measured by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Arctic Oscillation (AO). The Institute believes that such low-pressure systems enhance the NAO and AO early in the season but that, later in the winter, there is a delayed opposite effect. This would give rise to cold late winter spells across Europe.”

But the most thorough answer for both Dan and SP came from Jennifer Francis, who is a “research professor at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University, where she studies Arctic climate change and the link between the Arctic and global climates.”

“Does it seem as though your weather has become increasingly ‘stuck’ lately? Day after day of cold, rain, heat, or blue skies may not be a figment of your imagination…

“Arctic amplification describes the tendency for high Northern latitudes to experience enhanced warming or cooling relative to the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. This heightened sensitivity is linked to the presence of snow and sea ice, and the feedback loops that they trigger… [since] World War II, Arctic temperatures have increased at more than twice the global rate. A dramatic indicator of this warming is the loss of Arctic sea ice in summer, which has declined by 40 percent in just the past three decades. The area of lost ice is about 1.3 million square miles or roughly 42 percent of the area of the Lower 48 United States. “

Then there’s a detailed description of the jet stream and its “waviness;” read it yourselves. Point is that we need to limit the carbon pollution that causes global warming, if it’s not too late; the jury’s out on that.
***
Steve from Life Crits asked:
If you could pose God just one question, what would it be…aside from the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in it?

So it would have to be mundane, yet something I really want to know. Got it.

When I was a teenager, I was walking down the street, when suddenly something hit the top of one of the lens of the pair of glasses I was wearing, creating a fault line. Fortunately, it didn’t hurt my eye. It wasn’t hailing. I never found anything such as a BB that would explain it. What the heck WAS that?
***
GayProf from some university in a Decaying Midwestern Urban Center wrote:
Here is a tough, but fair, question: How did I get to be your favorite blogger?

Assuming the premise is actually true – it is the quality of your pieces. Did you know I have linked to EVERY SINGLE POST you have written since July of last year? Of course, that’s only two posts. But still…
***
Alexis, who I know personally, and who USED to blog, wants to know:

If you could have a conversation with any famous person, dead or alive, who would you pick?

I’ll choose Ben Franklin. I’d be quite interested to see what he thought of the current state of both technology and government. Could I bring him back to explain what the Founders meant by the separation of church and state? Or to explain the deadly effects of turtle sex? -I’m sure he’d find that fascinating.

W is for Weird Weather

There are simpler things to do, though, such as planting a tree and taking less energy dependent transportation.

People in the US state of Oklahoma have had a tough year. The state’s “July average temperature was a scorching 88.9 degrees, the warmest to occur in any state during any month on record. State record hailstone measuring nearly 6” from Gotebo on May 23… At the other extreme, Oklahoma recorded its coldest temperature on record on February 10 when Nowata dipped to a frigid -31 degrees. On that same the day, the state’s heaviest 24-hour snowfall on record piled up, with 27 inches measured in Spavinaw. Not to mention non-weather related events, such as the 5.6 magnitude earthquake, the strongest on record.

The Sooner State is hardly the only one. Back in the spring, there were already more weather-related fatalities in the US than in all of 2010. By the halfway point, NOAA had made it official: 2011 Among Most Extreme Weather Years in History. “Near the halfway point, 2011 has already seen eight weather-related disasters in the U.S. that caused more than $1 billion in damages.”

Then August 2011 set records in several locations for “torrid heat, torrential rain, and river flooding. You can thank, in part, an exceptional Plains drought and Hurricane Irene,” another billion-dollar event.

Of course, the question is why. A recent study linked air pollution to extreme weather. California is a leader in places where sometimes the air isn’t fit to breathe.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has urged countries to come up with disaster management plans to “adapt to the growing risk of extreme weather events linked to human-induced climate change.” See the report here. And the deniers are in full force.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. We CAN minimize the damage by making changes. Valmeyer, Illinois “was once a community of about 900 on the banks of the Mississippi River, 25 miles south of St. Louis. The Great Flood of 1993 left 90 percent of Valmeyer’s buildings damaged beyond repair…Valmeyer would be rebuilt on a 500-acre parcel on a nearby bluff overlooking the river…with energy-efficient home construction…resource-efficient institutions and…future renewable energy development. When the Mississippi flooded again, the town was safe, though it would not have been had they rebuilt in the same location.

There are simpler things to do, though, such as planting a tree and taking less energy-dependent transportation. Meanwhile, check out NOAA’s State of the Climate, a Global Analysis. Interesting stuff.

ABC Wednesday – Round 9

N is for Normal

My biology/homeroom teacher told me straight out that my father was “CRAZY” for leaving his job at IBM.

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, it was NORMAL for the mom to be home with the kids. My family wasn’t normal. My mother worked outside the home for as long as I can remember until she retired a decade and a half ago.

First, she was in the bookkeeping department at McLean’s department store in downtown Binghamton. Then she moved less than a block to Columbia Gas, where she was reportedly the first black person to work as a customer service rep. When she moved to Charlotte, NC, she was a bank teller for First Union bank.

No one has ever suggested that my father was anything like “normal.” In fact, my biology/homeroom teacher told me straight out that my father was “CRAZY” for leaving his job at IBM of six years (that he hated), especially for a position with Opportunities for Broome, an OEO government job (where he thought he was making a difference). Government jobs come and go, but once you’re in the IBM family, you were set for life. (IBM decided it actually DID start having to lay off people in the 1990s.)

So, normalcy isn’t always that appealing. It’s been used as a cudgel to block all sorts of individual and collective rights.

Conversely, I AM sympathetic, as I watch the trauma over the worldwide economic crisis when I hear people ask, “When will things get back to NORMAL?” Likewise, the “crazy” weather generates a similar response. People are desperately looking for a sense of stability/sanity.

I have to wonder if “normal” is coming, or, as I suspect, we’ve come to a “new normal” of stormy weather, fiscally and meteorologically.

As Bruce Cockburn sang: The trouble with normal is it always gets worse – LISTEN.

Maybe Normal is just a town in Illinois.

ABC Wednesday – Round 9

Roger Answers Your Questions, Amy

The earth MUST be the center of the universe, because God made the earth – or something like that. Suggesting otherwise was heresy, the Church said; science is WRONG.

Amy from Sharp Little Pencil – sometimes that instrument is VERY pointed, and my “favorite Apalachin girl who went to Vestal,” writes:

Hope all in your camp are all right, Roger. Three “hundred-year floods” in five years for Binghamton. Gee, Rick Perry, do you understand global warming NOW? It’s not a belief system; it’s not an “either, or,” it’s a fact, Jack.

My sister chides me about global climate change like it’s Darwin vs. Adam and Eve, and this thought just came to me. Part of the “religiosity” (ha ha) of Tea Bag/Fundies is that they truly blur the line between faith and fact, as though if you plug your ears and say “La la la” loud enough, it will go away; and worse, that people who don’t share your “beliefs” are somehow unworthy of citizenship in the US.

Take THAT ball and run with it, Roger!!! I’d love to hear or read your thoughts on this. Thanks, Amy

First off, I think that there are too many people who, through ignorance, some of it willful, I must say, decide that if it snows in the southern United States, or New Zealand, this somehow disproves global warming. One need only look at the two words: GLOBAL, over the whole world; WARMING, the average temperature of the planet is rising. Snow in Atlanta is the weather; the collective volume of hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts, and heavy rains is the climate, and it sure the heck seems to be altered, and not for the better. And I don’t believe that it will flip back, at least not without a radical change in our behavior. Check out the NASA Global Climate Change blog and be depressed.

I’ve read the Bible a few times, at least thrice all the way through, and I am at a loss to figure out just how a largely human-made climate change is a threat to a belief in a loving Saviour. Of course, I feel the same way about evolution or gay marriage re faith, so I’m a heretic to some anyway.

The issue I might compare it to is heliocentrism. The earth MUST be the center of the universe because God made the earth – or something like that, right? Suggesting otherwise was heresy, the Church said; science was WRONG. Most of us, except the flat earthers, know how THAT debate turned out. God can’t love us if we’re on the third rock from a second-class star? Huh?

Oh, and my last point: I’ve said this recently, but I’ll repeat it – the blurring of the line between American patriotism and Christianity I find rather disturbing. OK, very disturbing.

My reading of Jesus is that he spoke truth to power, not one to embrace the position and power of the status quo. There is a fundamental [intentionally used] belief out there that the United States is uniquely and singularly endowed by the Creator with powers and abilities far beyond those of “normal” countries. And I think that is hubris. Though, to be fair, I myself have wanted the United States to BE more that shining light it says it wants to be, which means taking care of our planet, no torture, no extraordinary rendition, more equitable distribution of income, no executions – especially of likely innocent people; talking to you, Rick Perry, as well as the state of Georgia. You will recall that those folks in the Bible who decided to build a tower to heaven were thwarted in their plans. Hubris, plain and simple.

What were your favorite and least favorite moments, growing up in the Binghamton area?

My favorite, I suppose, was meeting Rod Serling, when I kinda/sorta got to introduce him at a high school assembly.

My least favorite? The first that came to mind is when Curtis E. LeMay came to town. I don’t know if it was the time he came to the American Legion in Johnson City (right next to Binghamton, for the non-locals) when he was running as George Wallace’s Vice Presidential candidate on October 23, 1968, or some subsequent visit. There were about 200 demonstrators outside that first Legion event, according to the AP report, equal to the number of Legionnaires inside listening to the general, infamous for his statement about bombing North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age,” a quote he thought had been misconstrued. What bugged me at the event I attended was the vague scent of tear gas, unwarranted given the peaceful (though loud) nature of the protest.

PS I left a reply for you (finally) that asks you to email me regarding your thoughts on the Pledge…)

This is in reference to a comment I made on her blog – that I can’t immediately find – about how annoyed I was that “under God” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, and just in time for me to go to grade school.

I don’t have a problem pledging fealty to country, though that “liberty and justice for all” part has bugged me periodically. And I don’t mind pledging fealty to God. But when they get mixed together, then I have difficulty. The United States is NOT a theocracy; see my comment above. Moreover, the addition of “under God” to the Pledge just seemed a silly overreaction to the Red scare; it wasn’t in the original, composed by Francis Bellamy in 1892, for a good reason, I’m guessing.

The friend who sent me the visual above said, “I’m forward this picture,” entitled One Nation Under God by Jon McNaughton, “which I find blasphemous in so many ways, even though I’m not at all religious…” Well, I AM religious, for lack of a better word, and I find it just as blasphemous. (But to really “appreciate” it more fully, you must see it on his website, complete with narrative.) Sometimes I think the Jehovah’s Witnesses got it right; in the section regarding nationalism:
“Jehovah’s Witnesses are not allowed to salute the flag of any nation, recite the pledge of allegiance, stand for or sing the national anthem, run for public office, vote, or serve in the armed forces.” You know, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. And/or separation of church and state. And would I REALLY miss voting, given the system’s brokenness?