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What “longtermism” gets wrong about climate change

December 12, 2022

What “longtermism” gets wrong about climate change

 Corn affected by 2013 drought in Texas. Global warming is making summer droughts in Texas longer and more severe. USDA photo by Bob Nichols

In his new book What We Owe the Future, William MacAskill outlines the case for what he calls “longtermism.” That’s not just another word for long-term thinking. It’s an ideology and movement founded on some highly controversial ideas in ethics.

Longtermism calls for policies that most people, including those who advocate for long-term thinking, would find implausible or even repugnant. For example, longtermists like MacAskill argue that the more “happy people” who exist in the universe, the better the universe will become. “Bigger is better,” as MacAskill puts it in his book. Longtermism suggests we should not only have more children right now to improve the world, but ultimately colonize the accessible universe, even creating planet-size computers in space in which astronomically large populations of digital people live in virtual-reality simulations.

Backed by an enormous promotional budget of roughly $10 million that helped make What We Owe the Future a bestseller, MacAskill’s book aims to make the case for longtermism. Major media outlets like The New Yorker and The Guardian have reported on the movement, and MacAskill recently appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Longtermism’s ideology is gaining visibility among the general public and has already infiltrated the tech industry, governments, and universities. Tech billionaires like Elon Musk, who described longtermism as “a close match for my own philosophy,” have touted the book, and a recent article in the UN Dispatch noted that “the foreign policy community in general and the United Nations in particular are beginning to embrace longtermism.” So it’s important to understand what this ideology is, what its priorities are, and how it could be dangerous.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Climate Change Lockdowns? Yup, They Are Actually Going There…

December 9, 2022

Climate Change Lockdowns? Yup, They Are Actually Going There…


I suppose that we should have known that this was inevitable.  After establishing a precedent during the pandemic, now the elite apparently intend to impose lockdowns for other reasons as well.  What I have detailed in this article is extremely alarming, and I hope that you will share it with everyone that you can.  Climate change lockdowns are here, and if people don’t respond very strongly to this it is likely that we will soon see similar measures implemented all over the western world.  The elite have always promised to do “whatever it takes” to fight climate change, and now we are finding out that they weren’t kidding.

Over in the UK, residents of Oxfordshire will now need a special permit to go from one “zone” of the city to another.  But even if you have the permit, you will still only be allowed to go from one zone to another “a maximum of 100 days per year”…

Oxfordshire County Council yesterday approved plans to lock residents into one of six zones to ‘save the planet’ from global warming. The latest stage in the ’15 minute city’ agenda is to place electronic gates on key roads in and out of the city, confining residents to their own neighbourhoods.

Under the new scheme if residents want to leave their zone they will need permission from the Council who gets to decide who is worthy of freedom and who isn’t. Under the new scheme residents will be allowed to leave their zone a maximum of 100 days per year, but in order to even gain this every resident will have to register their car details with the council who will then track their movements via smart cameras round the city.

Are residents of Oxfordshire actually going to put up with this?

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Arctic Ocean overheating

December 8, 2022

Arctic Ocean overheating

Arctic sea ice extent was 10.31 million km² on December 4, 2022. At this time of year, extent was smaller only in two years, i.e. in 2016 and 2020, both strong El Niño years. With the next El Niño, Arctic sea ice extent looks set to reach record lows.

The NOAA image on the right indicates that, while we’re still in the depths of a persistent La Niña, the next El Niño looks set to strike soon.

The image below shows high sea surface temperature anomalies near the Bering Strait on December 2, 2022, with a “hot blob” in the North Pacific Ocean where sea surface temperature anomalies are reaching as high as 7°C or 12.6°F from 1981-2011. The Jet Stream is stretched out vertically from pole to pole, enabling hot air to enter the Arctic from the Pacific Ocean and from the Atlantic Ocean.

The image below shows a forecast for December 5, 2022, of 2m temperature anomalies versus 1979-2000, with anomalies over parts of the Arctic Ocean near the top end of the scale.
On December 6, 2022, the Arctic was 6.63°C or 11.93°F warmer compared to 1979-2000, as illustrated by the image below.
The image below shows the daily average Arctic air temperature (2m) from 1979 up to December 6, 2022.

Given that we’re still in the depth of a persistent La Niña, these currently very high air temperature anomalies indicate that ocean temperatures are very high and that ocean heat is heating up the air over the Arctic.

Additionally, ocean heat is melting the sea ice from below.

Accordingly, Arctic sea ice has barely increased in thickness over the past 30 days, as illustrated by the navy.mil animation on the right.

This leaves only a very short time for Arctic sea ice to grow back in thickness before the melting season starts again, which means that there will be little or no latent heat buffer to consume heat when the melting season starts.
…click on the above link to read the rest…

When the Bullseye is the Wrong Target

December 8, 2022

When the Bullseye is the Wrong Target

Guy R. McPherson, Beril Kallfelz-Sirmacek, and William M. Kallfelz, 30 November 2022, The largest elephant in the room: aerosol masking. arXiv:2211.16115

Guy R. McPherson, Beril Kallfelz-Sirmacek, and William M. Kallfelz, 30 November 2022, Medium: The largest elephant in the room: aerosol masking.

    Relevant articles:

Counterpunch, 25 November 2022:

Harper’s, December 2022: (This article ignorantly cheers for near-term human extinction, thereby ignoring the aerosol masking effect and the rapid rate of environmental change associated with the demise of humans from Earth)

AVID Audio Course Description (Conservation Biology)

 

Latest Peer-Reviewed Journal Article:

McPherson, Guy R., Beril Sirmack, and Ricardo Vinuesa. March 2022. Environmental thresholds for mass-extinction events. Results in Engineering (2022), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rineng.2022.100342.

Global Dimming Keeping the Planet Habitable

December 8, 2022

Global Dimming Keeping the Planet Habitable

If you have not already seen it,  visitors to this blog  will have an interest in this 50-min documentary, “BBC Global Dimming Documentary”, via Gail Zawacki at her Wit’s End blog.

It relates to evidence obtained from the three-day aircraft grounding that occurred after 9/11 and the profound effects that just the U.S. Commercial Aircraft Flying has on Earth’s atmosphere. (One degree Centigrade increase  within three days.)
Quoting Professor Guy McPherson ;
“The impact of the aerosol masking effect has been greatly underestimated, as pointed out in an 8 February 2019 article in Science. As indicated by the lead author of this paper on 25 January 2019: “Global efforts to improve air quality by developing cleaner fuels and burning less coal could end up harming our planet by reducing the number of aerosols in the atmosphere, and by doing so, diminishing aerosols’ cooling ability to offset global warming.” The cooling effect is “nearly twice what scientists previously thought.” That this February 2019 paper cites the conclusion by Levy et al. (2013) indicating as little as 35% reduction in industrial activity drives a 1 C global-average rise in temperature suggests that as little as a 20% reduction in industrial activity is sufficient to warm the planet 1 C within a few days or weeks.”
Guy and I both believe a serious economic crash could be the end of us!
None of these risks operate in a vacuum, they are all connected.

Imagine what the carbon footprint of the largest most brutal military on the planet must be?
“According to its own study, in 2013 the Pentagon consumed fuel equivalent to 90,000,000 barrels of crude oil. This amounts to 80% of the total fuel usage by the federal government. If burned as jet fuel it produces about 38,700,000 metric tons of CO2…”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Addressing Climate Change Will Not “Save the Planet”

December 4, 2022

Addressing Climate Change Will Not “Save the Planet”

The dismal reality is that green energy will save not the complex web of life on Earth but the particular way of life of one domineering species.

A boiler tower is surrounded by mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert on August 26, 2022 near Nipton, California.

A boiler tower surrounded by mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert, Calif., on Aug. 26, 2022. Photo: David McNew/Getty Images

CONSERVATION BIOLOGY FINDS itself in a terrifying place today, witness to mass extinction, helpless to stop the march of industrial Homo sapiens, the pillage of habitat, the loss of wildlands, and the impoverishment of ecosystems. Many of its leading figures are in despair. “I’m 40 years into conservation biology and I can tell you we are losing badly, getting our asses kicked,” Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under President Barack Obama, told me recently. “There are almost no reasons to be optimistic.”This might explain the discipline’s desperate hitching of its wagon to the climate movement. Climate, after all, is the environmental cause du jour, eclipsing all other sustainability concerns, increasingly attractive as a rallying cry for a public that has canonized it as one of the major political, social, and economic issues of our time. Mainstream climate activism of the Bill McKibben variety points toward a grandly hopeful end within the confines of acceptable capitalist discourse: decarbonization of the global economy, with technologies driven by profit-seeking corporations subsidized by governments. Taking up this banner of optimistic can-do-ism, the environmental movement has convinced itself, and sought to convince the public, that with a worldwide build-out of renewable energy systems, humanity will power its dynamic industrial civilization with jobs-producing green machines while also — somehow — rescuing countless species from the brink.

“But this happens to be a lie,” Ashe told me. “The lie is that if we address the climate crisis, we will also solve the biodiversity crisis.”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Visualizing The World’s Largest Hydroelectric Dams

December 3, 2022

Visualizing The World’s Largest Hydroelectric Dams

Did you know that hydroelectricity is the world’s biggest source of renewable energy? According to recent figures from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), it represents 40% of total capacity, ahead of solar (28%) and wind (27%).

This type of energy is generated by hydroelectric power stations, which are essentially large dams that use the water flow to spin a turbine. They can also serve secondary functions such as flow monitoring and flood control.

To help you learn more about hydropower, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu has visualized the five largest hydroelectric dams in the world, ranked by their maximum output.

Overview of the Data

The following table lists key information about the five dams shown in this graphic, as of 2021. Installed capacity is the maximum amount of power that a plant can generate under full load.

 

At the top of the list is China’s Three Gorges Dam, which opened in 2003. It has an installed capacity of 22.5 gigawatts (GW), which is close to double the second-place Itaipu Dam.

 

In terms of annual output, the Itaipu Dam actually produces about the same amount of electricity. This is because the Parana River has a low seasonal variance, meaning the flow rate changes very little throughout the year. On the other hand, the Yangtze River has a significant drop in flow for several months of the year.

For a point of comparison, here is the installed capacity of the world’s three largest solar power plants, also as of 2021:

  • Bhadla Solar Park, India: 2.2 GW
  • Hainan Solar Park, China: 2.2 GW
  • Pavagada Solar Park, India: 2.1 GW

Compared to our largest dams, solar plants have a much lower installed capacity. However, in terms of cost (cents per kilowatt-hour), the two are actually quite even.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

October 2022: Earth’s 4th-warmest October on record

November 30, 2022

October 2022: Earth’s 4th-warmest October on record

Europe had its warmest October on record, as did Northern Hemisphere land areas.
Warm afternoon in London on 11/28/22
Sunshine bathes government buildings at Whitehall Street in London on the unusually mild afternoon of Friday, October 28, 2022. The high of 66 degrees Fahrenheit at Kew Gardens followed 70 degrees on October 27. Some of the warmest late-October weather ever recorded reached many locations in Europe, including 92 degrees Fahrenheit at Lomnè, France, on October 29. (Image credit: Bob Henson)

October 2022 was Earth’s fourth-warmest October since record-keeping began in 1880, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) reported November 15. NASA rated October as the fifth-warmest on record, behind 2016, 1.23 degrees Celsius (2.21°F) above the 1880-1920 period – its best estimate for when preindustrial temperatures last occurred. The European Copernicus Climate Change Service and the Japan Meteorological Agency rated October 2022 as the third-warmest October on record. Such minor differences in the agencies’ rankings can result from the different ways they treat data-sparse regions such as the Arctic.

Land areas had their second-warmest October on record in 2022, land areas in the Northern Hemisphere had their warmest October on record, and global ocean temperatures were the fifth-warmest on record, according to NOAA. Europe had its warmest October on record; Africa, its third-warmest; and Asia and North America, their sixth-warmest. Oceania and South America each had a warmer-than-average October, but the month did not rank among their top 10 warmest on record.

The year-to-date global surface temperature is the sixth-highest on record, and 2022 is 99% likely to end up as the sixth-warmest year on record, according to NOAA.

Land and ocean temperature percentiles
Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average for October 2022, the fourth-warmest October for the globe since record-keeping began in 1880, according to NOAA. Parts of western and central Europe, western North America, and Africa experienced record-high October temperatures. No areas experienced record cold. (Image credit: NOAA/NCEI)

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Just Collapse: War in a Changing Climate

November 30, 2022

Just Collapse: War in a Changing Climate

The planetary emergency we must avoid (spoiler alert: it’s not climate change)

November 29, 2022

Employees work on the production line of Haima 7X-E electric vehicle at Haima Automobile Haikou Base in China. Photo: Getty Images

Employees work on the production line of Haima 7X-E electric vehicle at Haima Automobile Haikou Base in China. Photo: Getty Images

The planetary emergency we must avoid (spoiler alert: it’s not climate change)

Rather than expanding our renewable electricity production and developing an EV fleet, a degrowth approach would be to initiate a massive energy conservation programme and investing in cities where we can live, work and play within 15 minutes’ walking or biking

Opinion: Purchasing an EV is something more people are doing to reduce the worst impacts of climate change. EVs are attractive and increasingly convenient.

But is this reaction to the climate crisis an example of the wrong solution to the wrong problem? Is climate change, as serious as it is, even the most important problem to address?

Climate change is certainly an existential threat and more needs to be done to mitigate its worst impacts. Yet even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, we would still face a range of environmental existential threats.

Part of the problem is we haven’t defined the problem correctly. Rather than trying to deal with specific issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and so on, there is an underlying cause that connects these threats. Understanding the cause could provide a new approach to dealing with many of these challenges.

First let’s step back and try to understand just what the threat is. As far as we know Earth is the only planet in the universe with complex living systems, with a biosphere covering its surface.

The biosphere is an intricately balanced network of living and non-living systems interacting with each other in a self-regulatory manner. This rare web of life provides for us physically, economically, aesthetically and spiritually.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Real Environmental Disaster: Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ Everywhere, Even Babies’ Umbilical Cords

November 28, 2022

The Real Environmental Disaster: Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ Everywhere, Even Babies’ Umbilical Cords

The corporate state assumes for itself the role of environmental savior, ordained by God Himself to wage holy war against “climate change.”

But it doesn’t apparently care too much, strangely, about the ongoing synthetic “forever” chemicals infestation of literally everything, including the food and water, which eventually make their way into even babies’ umbilical cords.

Via Environmental Working Group:

“EWG scientists reviewed 40 studies examining the presence and health effects of PFAS [perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances] in cord blood. All 40 reported the detection of a wide range of PFAS in the blood. Sixteen studies found associations between PFAS exposure in cord blood and changes in vital body molecules called cord blood lipids, as well as harm to fetal and childhood development.”

Babies will get to enjoy those plastics for the duration of their lifetimes, from cradle to grave.

PFAS, per the National Institutes of Health, are used universally in all kinds of everyday products from food packaging to carpets to the water supply. The social engineers also lovingly add PFAS to COVID masks – the kind that schoolchildren who have no appreciable health risks are forced to wear in order to receive an education.

PFAS have earned the charming nickname “forever chemicals” because, as the name suggests, they don’t degrade in the environment like organic molecules and they stay in the body forever.

The body’s natural detoxification organs, the liver and kidneys, are incapable of filtering them out. Once ingested, they remain unmolested in the blood and tissues.

One doesn’t need a degree in The Science© to understand why babies administered a steady diet of PFAS isn’t an optimal situation health-wise. Here are a few reasons anyway:

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Chris Hedges: Imminent Mass Extinction

November 21, 2022

Chris Hedges: Imminent Mass Extinction

With thick ice gone, Arctic sea ice changes more slowly

November 18, 2022

With thick ice gone, Arctic sea ice changes more slowly

Beaufort Sea
Small remnants of thicker, multiyear ice float with thinner, seasonal ice in the Beaufort Sea on Sept. 30, 2016. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Alek Petty
› Larger view

The Arctic Ocean’s blanket of sea ice has changed since 1958 from predominantly older, thicker ice to mostly younger, thinner ice, according to new research published by NASA scientist Ron Kwok of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. With so little thick, old ice left, the rate of decrease in ice thickness has slowed. New ice grows faster but is more vulnerable to weather and wind, so ice thickness is now more variable, rather than dominated by the effect of global warming.

Working from a combination of satellite records and declassified submarine sonar data, NASA scientists have constructed a 60-year record of Arctic sea ice thickness. Right now, Arctic sea ice is the youngest and thinnest its been since we started keeping records. More than 70 percent of Arctic sea ice is now seasonal, which means it grows in the winter and melts in the summer, but doesn’t last from year to year. This seasonal ice melts faster and breaks up easier, making it much more susceptible to wind and atmospheric conditions.

Working from a combination of satellite records and declassified submarine sonar data, NASA scientists have constructed a 60-year record of Arctic sea ice thickness. Right now, Arctic sea ice is the youngest and thinnest its been since we started keeping records. More than 70 percent of Arctic sea ice is now seasonal, which means it grows in the winter and melts in the summer, but doesn’t last from year to year. This seasonal ice melts faster and breaks up easier, making it much more susceptible to wind and atmospheric conditions.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Climate Action- Right Way, Wrong Way

November 15, 2022

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Imperialism Of The Apocalypse

November 14, 2022

Imperialism Of The Apocalypse

Rich people are depriving poor people of cheap energy in the name of climate change. Why?

Clockwise from upper-left: Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex; Jennifer Lawrence; Prince Harry; Leonardo DiCaprio. Center: Pakistani boy with woodfuel for cooking (Getty Images)

Few appear to care about climate change more than global celebrities. In 2019, Leonardo DiCaprio told the U.N., “Climate Change is our single greatest security threat.” Late last year, DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence starred in the Hollywood climate disaster movie, “Don’t Look Up.” Said Lawrence, “You’re watching these hurricanes now and it’s hard, especially while promoting this movie, not to feel Mother Nature’s rage or wrath.” In a United Nations speech earlier this year, Prince Harry said “Climate change is wreaking havoc on our planet, with the most vulnerable suffering most of all.” All have urged individuals and nations to radically reduce their carbon emissions.

And yet global celebrities are, along with global political leaders, the planet’s biggest climate hypocrites. DiCaprio, Lawrence, Harry, and Meghan have been flying on private jets, partying on gas-guzzling yachts, and riding jet skis for years. Already 400 private jets, which are five to 14 times more polluting than commercial flights, have arrived in Egypt for United Nations annual climate talks. Last year, 40,000 people flew to Scotland, many on private jets, for climate talks, generating an estimated 102,000 tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of burning 237,000 barrels of oil. After they arrived, they were treated to a video of a talking CGI dinosaur, voiced over by Jack Black, urging African nations to not use fossil fuels.

It’s true that celebrities have promised to do better. DiCaprio flew commercial to climate talks last year. Meghan and Harry flew commercial back to London last year. Lawrence flew commercial after her private plane nearly crashed. And most of the 30,000 participants in this year’s climate talks will arrive in commercial airplanes.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

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