climate – Page 4 – Olduvai.ca

Nothing drives me crazier than simplistic solutions to complex problems. Given our changing climate, there has been an explosion of “drought tolerant” and “firewise” plant lists in the gardening world. Most of these lists are devoid of science and all of them are removed from reality. The fact is that taxonomy plays a minimal role in determining whether a plant will tolerate environmental extremes.

**Lack of irrigation and mulch guarantees a drought-stressed landscape regardless of the selected species.**

Let’s start with the most obvious problems with these lists. The goal isn’t to have plants that require less additional water – it’s to have a landscape that requires less additional water. Similarly, the relative flammability of plants is less important than whether the landscape surrounding those plants is protected from fire. Plants don’t exist in vacuum and unless you are strictly a container gardener a single plant’s impact on water use or fire resilience is negligible. So a gardener’s questions should be “How can I make my landscape more drought tolerant? How can I reduce the likelihood of wildfire damage?” And these are questions that can be addressed with knowledge gleaned from applied plant and soil sciences.

Drought Tolerance

***Arborvitae can tolerate droughty summers, but they don’t tolerate improper planting and management.***

First of all, let’s think about what “drought” really means: it’s an unusual lack of rainfall. It doesn’t mean no irrigation, and it doesn’t mean dry soil. Drought is a climatological term, not one associated with soil water management. Fine roots and their root hairs require water to function. Without sufficient soil water plants will go dormant or die, particularly during establishment. Plants that are drought tolerant can tolerate seasonal lack of rainfall, but they can’t tolerate chronically dry soil conditions.

***Even “drought tolerant” species like Sempervivum will die if there’s not enough soil water.***

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

CopOut26, B Grade Cabaret Not Science

November 23, 2021

CopOut26, B Grade Cabaret Not Science

Mercifully, the charade known as Cop 26 has drawn to it’s ignominious end.

Almost all commentators are describing this latest Cop as a near total failure. As I have mentioned previously in this space it’s a near total success. The USA created the IPCC to prevent activists scientists from holding Capitalism’s feet to the abrupt climate change fire. It’s Time to Acknowledge the Spectacular Success of the IPCC.

In our video critique of the charade below I quoted the hyperlinked article from Democracy Now;
“Critiques of COP26 from activists both inside and outside its walls range from business as usual to abject failure. The United Kingdom’s shambolic management of the event, its strict visa requirements and its failure to deliver on its promised, pre-COP vaccination plan for attendees from nations with low vaccine availability have made this summit the whitest, most privileged COP in its 30-year history.” “While widespread access challenges have prevented thousands from participating, over 500 oil, gas and coal lobbyists have been given the red carpet treatment. If they were a nation, according to a new Global Witness report, they would be the largest delegation at COP26.”
Like Locusts, Lobbyists Swarm COP26 in Glasgow

“And here is the most impressive bluff: Just like in Kyoto and Paris, in Glasgow too, emissions of hothouse gases by all the world’s militaries are outside the game. Even though armies are some of the worst polluters on the face of the earth, no one is discussing them, no one is counting then, no one is proposing that their swelling ranks be cut. And not one single government is reporting honestly about the amount of garbage its army spews into the air.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

To Keep Fossil Carbon Out of the Air, Just Stop Pulling It Out of the Earth

November 22, 2021

To Keep Fossil Carbon Out of the Air, Just Stop Pulling It Out of the Earth

Expectations for the 2021 COP26 climate summit were always low. They had dimmed even further by the time the prominent climate activist Vanessa Nakate of Uganda spoke from the main stage on the Glasgow conference’s next-to-last day.

Nakate chided her audience for sleepwalking toward catastrophe: “We see business leaders and investors flying into COP on private jets. We see them making fancy speeches. We hear about new pledges and promises. … I have come here to tell you that we don’t believe you.” She added, “I am here to say, prove us wrong.”

Throughout the summit, people of all ages and backgrounds had rallied in the streets outside to demand effective climate action, climate justice, an end to exploitation, and other policies through which the world’s governments might prove Nakate wrong.

On November 5, more than 8,000 children, teenagers, parents, and teachers marched through the city, calling on the generation now in power not to ruin the future for generations who follow. The next day, a surge of more than 100,000 climate marchers demanded an end to fossil fuel investments, a global conversion to renewable energy financed by wealthy countries, and reparations for Indigenous communities.

Tuntiak Katan, a member of the Shuar nation in Ecuador, reminded reporters that “Indigenous peoples already protect 950 million hectares of land worldwide.” Affluent nations, he said, must “abandon extractivism and get the oil, mining and agribusiness companies out of our territories, and apply a holistic vision, combined with the vision of the indigenous peoples.”

The Glasgow marchers’ goals were both necessary and achievable, but they knew all too well that fossilized COP summits have failed the world twenty-five times since 1995, and COP26 would be no different.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

COP26: Uberizing Farms to Save the Climate

November 22, 2021

COP26: Uberizing Farms to Save the Climate

At COP26, there was a notable silence around the distorted food system that pollutes the Earth and our bodies, writes Vijay Prashad.

Mining Cryptocurrency, 2021. (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)

As the last private plane took off from the Glasgow airport and the dust settled, the detritus of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, remains.

The final communiqués are slowly being digested, their limited scope inevitable. António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, closed the proceedings by painting two dire images: “Our fragile planet is hanging by a thread. We are still knocking on the door of climate catastrophe. It is time to go into emergency mode — or our chance of reaching net zero will itself be zero.”

The loudest cheer in the main hall did not erupt when this final verdict was announced, but when it was proclaimed that the next COP would be held in Cairo in 2022. It seems enough to know that another COP will take place.

An army of corporate executives and lobbyists crowded the official COP26 platforms; in the evening, their cocktail parties entertained government officials.

While the cameras focused on official speeches, the real business was being done in these evening parties and in private rooms. The very people who are most responsible for the climate catastrophe shaped many of the proposals that were brought to the table at COP26.

Meanwhile, climate activists had to resort to making as loud a noise as possible far from the Scottish Exchange Campus (SEC Centre), where the summit was hosted.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

18th November 2021 Today’s Round-Up of Climate News

November 18, 2021

https://climateandeconomy.com/2021/11/18/18th-november-2021-todays-round-up-of-climate-news/

Warning – Migrate from Urban Cities to the Suburbs

November 17, 2021

Warning – Migrate from Urban Cities to the Suburbs

I have warned that they were considering lockdowns for climate change. India has been the first to impose a lockdown in New Delhi all for air pollution. I strongly recommend that if you can, get out of the major urban cities before you find yourself locked in home imprisonment denied all human rights on the basis of climate. This is the New World Order and the end goal is to even eliminate office buildings and commuting.

Separating the self-flagellation from the greenhouse gas

November 13, 2021

Separating the self-flagellation from the greenhouse gas

Speaking to the media at the Youth4Climate event last week, Greta Thunberg berated the UK for continuing to extract oil and gas from the North Sea while pretending to be green ahead of the coming COP26 conference. Not only that, but as the originator of the industrial revolution, Britain is doubly guilty:

“Of course, the climate crisis … more or less it started in the UK since that’s where the industrial revolution started, we started to burn coal there, so of course the UK has an enormous historical responsibility when it comes to historic emissions since the climate crisis is a cumulative crisis.”

So, here’s an interesting question that Greta has probably never had to answer, and which many of my readers will probably get wrong. If we add up all of the carbon dioxide emitted by households, businesses and industries within the boundaries of what we now call the United Kingdom, when will China – currently the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide – overtake? 2025? 2035? 2050?

No, in fact, China overtook the UK in cumulative carbon dioxide emissions two decades ago in 2002:

The reason for this is that China’s march to industrialisation following its admission to the World Trade Organisation, arrived just at the point when the world’s conventional oil deposits were beginning to deplete. Moreover, by December 2001, while oil was still in demand, most of the developed states had made deep cuts to their coal use. This gave China access both to its own deposits and to cheap deposits from around the world. But coal is a particularly heavy emitter of carbon dioxide, and China’s emissions from coal had already passed those of the UK – for the last time – in 1968:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Things Feel Bleak Because This Way of Life is Coming to an End

November 8, 2021

Things Feel Bleak Because This Way of Life is Coming to an End

The Lesson of 2021 is Either We Change — or Things Collapse Around Us

Here’s a tiny question. What is the lesson Covid is trying to teach us? As we settle in to a new normal, where Covid is going permanent, and there’s not much anyone can do about it except the billionaires who could vaccinate the world, but won’t — what should we be learning?

I think of Covid as a message backwards, from the future. And it says something like this. Life as you knew it is now over. The future is now going to become a bitter and bruising battle for the basics. The basics. Air, water, food, medicine, energy. Things that many of us once took for granted, and assumed would simply be around, as if by magic.

That age is now coming to an end. Did you ever think that breathable air would be in short supply? Where you have to wear a mask, because the air could infect you with a respiratory virus? That is what the future looks like, except for all the basics.

Another way to say that is that a certain way of life is now coming to an end.

To make that point, let me ask the question: why have Eastern countries done better on Covid than Western ones? What does that teach us about the future? Well, the first thing it teaches us that money and power and history are no guarantee of success in this battle for basics that the future is now about. Maybe the rich can buy clean air — but a whole society? Forget it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The climate war won’t work

October 30, 2021

The climate war won’t work

There are, in fact, no human comparisons for the effort required to reverse the global-scale damage wrought by 300 years of industrial growth. Nevertheless, people still reach for past human endeavours to try to spur our political leaders to an action which, in truth, is far beyond them. How many times have we heard that tackling climate change requires an effort similar in scale to the Apollo moon landings or the Manhattan Project? And then there is the stubbornly undead comparison to the Second World War. Every time we think we have successfully driven a stake through the heart of this insane proposition, someone who has failed to understand what the war was really about, resurrects it and drafts it into service in the fight against climate change.

Today it is everyone’s favourite media environmentalist George Monbiot’s turn to suggest that:

“The astonishing story of how the US entered the second world war should be on everyone’s minds as Cop26 approaches.”

Monbiot gives a reasonable summary of the various measures taken by the Roosevelt Administration to mobilise the US economy for war in the wake of Pearl Harbour. Then he asks:

“So what stops the world from responding with the same decisive force to the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced? It’s not a lack of money or capacity or technology. If anything, digitisation would make such a transformation quicker and easier. It’s a problem that Roosevelt faced until Pearl Harbor: a lack of political will. Now, just as then, public hostility and indifference, encouraged by legacy industries (today, above all, fossil fuel, transport, infrastructure, meat and media), outweighs the demand for intervention…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“To Dirty it!” On how For-Profit News Obscured William Shatner’s Climate Emergency Warning after Suborbital Flight

October 17, 2021

“To Dirty it!” On how For-Profit News Obscured William Shatner’s Climate Emergency Warning after Suborbital Flight

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Wednesday, pop culture icon William Shatner, Star Trek‘s Captain James Tiberius Kirk, explained the enormity of seeing the earth from a suborbital flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepherd space craft. Part of what he said when he returned from 66 miles up got lost in all of the news reports I’ve seen, and it is the most important part.

Here’s a portion of what CNBC printed in what they alleged was the complete transcript of Shatner’s remarks:

“I mean, the little things, the weightlessness, and to see the blue color whip by and now you’re staring into blackness. That’s the thing. This covering of blue is this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue around that we have around us. We think ‘oh, that’s blue sky’ and suddenly you shoot through it all of a sudden, like you whip a sheet off you when you’re asleep, and you’re looking into blackness – into black ugliness. And you look down, there’s the blue down there, and the black up there, and there is Mother Earth and comfort and – is there death? Is that the way death is?”

But here’s the crucial takeaway, the last phrase of which is omitted by CNBC:

“The jeopardy . . . And to dirty it!” To fill this precious atmosphere, unique in our solar system, with clouds of burned coal dust and with greenhouse gases, Shatner says, is . . . what? Despicable. Unthinkable.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

La Niña expected to affect climate around the world by end of year

October 3, 2021

La Niña expected to affect climate around the world by end of year

Do you wish you had a crystal ball that could tell you what the climate will be next year when you plan your garden? So do many other gardeners (and climatologists). But while there is no magic answer, we do know that in many parts of the United States and other countries, year-to-year climate variability is strongly dominated by what is going on in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. This is through a phenomenon called “El Niño Southern Oscillation” or ENSO for short.

Witch Hazel Covered By Snow In The Garden. Hampshire UK. Source: Si Griffiths, Commons Wikimedia

What is ENSO and how does it affect climate?

ENSO has three phases—a cold phase with unusually cold water in the equatorial Eastern Pacific Ocean (EPO) called “La Niña”, a warm phase with unusually warm water in the EPO, and the neutral phase that occurs between the two extreme phases. The ocean see-saws back and forth between the two opposite phases on a semi-regular pattern that usually lasts between two and five years from one El Niño to the next. Sometimes you can have two La Niña years (or even three) back-to-back (the end of 2021 is expected to be a second La Niña in a row), but you almost never have two consecutive years of El Niño.

In many parts of the world, the phase of the ENSO is highly correlated with the climate. Scientists can use that relationship to predict what the climate might be like in the coming months. That is helpful for gardeners who need to know what to expect both next season and next year for planning purposes…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Coming Climate Crisis Shakedown in Scotland

September 25, 2021

The Coming Climate Crisis Shakedown in Scotland

In 2016, an inconceivable event aborted the Paris climate scheme. The Americans elected Donald Trump. Calling the Paris deal a rip-off of his country, Trump swiftly pulled the U.S. out of the accords. Upon what grounds? Put simply, America First.

“Follow the money!”

The old maxim is always sound advice when assessing the motives of those advancing bold agendas for the benefit of mankind.

Invariably, the newest progressive idea entails a transfer of wealth from the taxpaying classes of Western nations to our transnational, global and Third World elites.

For the masters of the universe, establishing justice and equality for the world’s poor are rewarding exercises in every sense of the word.

Consider the 2015 Paris climate accords.

Its declared goal: Save the planet from the ravages of climate change, which is caused by carbon dioxide emissions, which are produced by industrial nations with too many of the world’s factories, farms, ships, planes and autos.

Under the Paris accords, wealthier nations of the West were to set and meet strict national targets for reducing their carbon emissions.

Together, these reductions were to prevent any rise in the planet’s temperature of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

This was presented as the world’s last best hope of preventing a climate catastrophe in this century.

Among the warnings the climate has been sending us:

The melting of polar ice caps, killer hurricanes, droughts, wildfires such as we had this year in California, river floods in Europe, rising sea levels, and the swamping of coastal towns, cities and islands like the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Not enough fossil fuels left to trigger another mass extinction

September 12, 2021

Not enough fossil fuels left to trigger another mass extinction

Preface. Since both conventional and unconventional oil peaked in 2018, we clearly won’t be burning fossils at exponentially increasing rates until 2400 as the IPCC expected. Quite the opposite, currently the decline rate of oil is 8% a year, which can be reduced to 4% by enhanced oil recovery techniques. The other 4% could be remedied by finding more oil, but discoveries have been at their lowest point for decades the past 7 years, and with oil prices so low, exploration and new projects are on hold.

Many books, starting with Ward’s “Under a Green Sky” warned that we would bring on another major extinction event burning fossil fuels. News reports continue to assume that this will be the eventual outcome as well. So you may not be aware of what it took to bring on the mother of all extinctions: The Permian. Although it’s commonly said that we are emitting far more CO2 faster than ever in history, this isn’t true.

Amazingly, researchers don’t blame the 300,000 to 1 million years of volcanic traps. Rather, it appears there were two pulses of lava from deep beneath the earth that rose to the surface, burning through underground deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas. That released an enormous amount of CO2 into the atmosphere; 100,000 billion tonnes (= 1 × 10¹⁴ tonnes). That is an almost incomprehensible amount of carbon injected into the atmosphere in a short (geologically speaking) period of time. This is more than 40 times the amount of all carbon available in modern fossil fuel reserves including carbon already burned since the industrial revolution.”

Researchers also don’t find methane hydrates a suspect, because it was “highly unlikely based on our data” according to Dr. Marcus Gutjahr from GEOMAR, co-author of the study (SD 2020).

Related articles:

Clarkson, M. O., et al. 2015. Ocean acidification and the Permo-Triassic mass extinction. Science 348:229.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Lake Mead – The Largest Reservoir in the United States – Drops to a Record Low

September 12, 2021

Lake Mead – The Largest Reservoir in the United States – Drops to a Record Low

August 7, 2000

August 9, 2021

The reservoir stands at its lowest level since the 1930s.

Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States and part of a system that supplies water to at least 40 million people across seven states and northern Mexico. It stands today at its lowest level since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. This means less water will be portioned out to some states in the 2022 water year.

As of August 22, 2021, Lake Mead was filled to just 35 percent of its capacity. The low water level comes at a time when 95 percent of the land in nine Western states is affected by some level of drought (64 percent is extreme or worse). It continues a 22-year megadrought that may be the region’s worst dry spell in twelve centuries.

These natural-color images were acquired in August 2000 and August 2021 by Landsat 7 and Landsat 8. The tan fringes along the shoreline in 2021 are areas of the lakebed that would be underwater when the reservoir is filled closer to capacity. The phenomenon is often referred to as a “bathtub ring.”

The lake elevation data below come from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages Lake Mead, Lake Powell, and other portions of the Colorado River watershed. At the end of July 2021, the water elevation at the Hoover Dam was 1067.65 feet (325 meters) above sea level, the lowest since April 1937, when the lake was still being filled. The elevation at the end of July 2000—around the time of the Landsat 7 images above and below—was 1199.97 feet (341 meters).

2000 – 2021

At maximum capacity, Lake Mead reaches an elevation 1,220 feet (372 meters) near the dam and would hold 9.3 trillion gallons (36 trillion liters) of water. The lake last approached full capacity in the summers of 1983 and 1999. It has been dropping ever since.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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