Global Warming

[Rorschach]

IQS I'm surprised you never mentioned that scientists the world over are worried about the Nitrogen uptake of plants due to CO2 emissions, how remiss of you

[Super Nova]

Good article here. While we may not agree on many things on this topic I think we agree that waste stupid taxes and incentives are backward. (I'm not a greenie)

With international climate negotiations working toward some form of agreement in 2015 that would only come into effect at the end of the decade, the world is “drifting off track,” in the words of IEA executive director Marina van der Hoeven at the press conference releasing the analysis. “But the problem is not going away.” Instead of dithering for a decade and paying for phantom emission reductions, the kinds of emissions declines seen in the U.S. must be repeated the world over. And that will take everything from CO2 capture and storage in Europe to more nuclear power in China, as well as the new plan to phase out HFCs. The rest is hot air from a bunch of flimflam artists.

This is important article.

Who Is Fooling Whom When It Comes to Combating Climate Change?

By David Biello | June 11, 2013 | Comments17

Here’s the scam. A Chinese company manufactures hydrofluorocarbons, the refrigerant gases responsible for the ozone hole and climate change. The gases can efficiently be turned into cash, either by using them in products like refrigerators or air conditioners or, more lucratively, by destroying them. In the early part of the last decade, Chinese manufacturers of HFCs made more and more of them—more than necessary for use even in the rapidly growing Communist country—because the international market for buying and selling the right to pollute with greenhouse gases awarded credits for their destruction. The gas could be made more cheaply—and then destroyed—than the carbon credits that resulted from their destruction were worth. All told, Chinese manufacturers netted billions of dollars in profits from an international effort meant to pay for developing countries to reduce pollution via projects such as preventing forests from being cut down or building more expensive renewable energy projects.

So when the Chinese agree to phase out HFCs, as their President Xi Jinping apparently did with U.S. President Barack Obama, they should be applauded—and shamed. Such cons are the most insidious reason why the world is not on track to restrain global warming to just 2 degrees Celsius, and could see average temperatures more than 5 degrees C higher if more efforts are not made.

In 2012, greenhouse gas pollution of all kinds, but particularly carbon dioxide, set another all-time record. The International Energy Agency estimates that CO2 levels hit 31.6 million metric tons last year, which also helped concentrations in the atmosphere touch 400 parts-per-million this spring. And while China saw the smallest increase in its emissions in a decade—just 300 million metric tons—that is still nearly half of the global increase and more than the emissions of Poland in total.

So it is good news that Obama and Xi could agree to do something about such pollution in their shirt sleeves this past weekend. Though the exact details have yet to be worked out or agreed, the two countries pledged to phase out the use of hydrofluorocarbons. If joined by all the other countries that still employ HFCs, the equivalent of roughly three years worth of global emissions from fossil fuel burning could be avoided—some 90 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent.

Of course, the agreement is for a gradual phaseout so those two years worth of emissions will be saved in bits and pieces over the next 30 years. And, remember, much of China’s HFCs are the result of the aforementioned long-running scam. Now that the jig is up on that particular scam, the Chinese are seemingly happy to commit to a gradual phaseout of the use of the refrigerant chemical—a concession the country, along with India, had been resisting for the last decade. For all that time, there have been replacements available. Capitalism trumps the environment, even if you are a Chinese communist party member.

There is good news out there. Europe and particularly the U.S. saw emissions decline; the former due to an emissions trading scheme (that helped pay for the Chinese scam) and the latter thanks to a complex blend of factors, including the switch from burning cheap coal to make electricity to burning the cheap natural gas released via fracking. Oh, and let’s not forget the Great Recession. The combined drop of 250 million metric tons of CO2 is potentially enough to deflect the world from the highest emissions scenario envisioned by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to a slightly less warm one, as noted by climate scientist Dana Nuccitelli on his Climate Consensus blog.

On the other hand, Japan saw its greenhouse gas emissions rise by 70 million metric tons, thanks to a switch from generating electricity via nuclear fission to burning natural gas for that purpose. We’re going to need yet more help from better energy technologies to meet any kind of climate goal, let alone stay on this slightly less perilous emissions trajectory.

As the world turns its thoughts back to economic growth, the IEA suggests four policies that might help restrain this continuing growth in greenhouse gas pollution in the next decade. First and foremost: improve the energy efficiency of new and old buildings worldwide, as well as the fuel consumption of both the world’s vehicles and its factories. The methane currently leaking into the sky from coal mines and the wells and pipelines of the oil and gas industry must be captured and burned or put to use. Subsidies for burning coal, oil and natural gas must be eliminated to discourage use of the fossil fuels. And new coal-fired power plants should be limited (if not outright banned) in favor of renewables and natural gas.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/obs ... te-change/

[IQS.RLOW]

Here’s the scam

The whole thing is a scam. Govts cannot create another piece of the pie and give it value, tax it, create a market for it and have it traded without it being full of holes.

It's a capitalist solution for a socialist invention and destined to be rorted. Free markets and economies develop from invention of tangibles. They are not invented from thin air.

The carbon market is nothing but a govt mandated socialist bitcoin

[Super Nova]

So climate deniers.... is Obama wrong to give this focus?

It is time that the US took the lead on this issue.

Barack Obama to cut emissions in vow to save planet
Barack Obama today unveiled the most ambitious plan to counter climate change ever put forward by a US president, saying he would not condemn future generations “to a planet that is beyond fixing”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... lanet.html

[Rorschach]

So climate alarmists is obama wrong?

clue... the answer starts with "y'

[AiA in Atlanta]

As a top former White House aide puts it, “There’s a generation of people who’ve grown up not asking whether global warming exists,” but simply taking it for granted.

[AiA in Atlanta]

California is on fire. Scientists have found that climate change exacerbates the conditions that fuel wildfires. But the right-wing nutters say climate change has nothing to do with the wildfires. But these are the same people that deny evolution by saying "But why can't we see it."

[iron monkey]

California is on fire. Scientists have found that climate change exacerbates the conditions that fuel wildfires. But the right-wing nutters say climate change has nothing to do with the wildfires. But these are the same people that deny evolution by saying "But why can't we see it."

How are the the climate change advoicates able to prove that climate change exacerbates the conditions that fue wild fires?

Or is this a sensationalist scare tactic of suggesting that the unknown, the unproven is a fact merely because it said by someone first.

[Rorschach]

A leaked copy of the world’s most authoritative climate study reveals scientific forecasts of imminent doom were drastically wrong.

The IPCC recognises the global warming ‘pause’ first reported by The Mail on Sunday last year is real – and concede that their computer models did not predict it. But they cannot explain why world average temperatures have not shown any statistically significant increase since 1997

Last night Professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said the leaked Summary for Policy-makers showed that ‘the science is clearly not settled, and is in a state of flux’. She said it therefore made no sense that the IPCC was claiming that its confidence in its forecasts and conclusions has increased. ‘The consensus-seeking process used by the IPCC creates and amplifies biases in the science. It should be abandoned in favour of a more traditional review that presents arguments for and against – which would better support scientific progress, and be more useful for policy makers.

Dr Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, described the leaked report as a ‘staggering concoction of confusion, speculation and sheer ignorance’. As for the pause, he said ‘it would appear that the IPCC is running out of answers … to explain why there is a widening gap between predictions and reality’.

A new study in the journal Nature Climate Change that compared 117 climate predictions made in the 1990′s to the actual amount of warming finds that 99% of them overestimated the amount of warming. On average, the predictions forecasted two times more global warming than actually occurred.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/57923

[Rorschach]

There has been a 60 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, the equivalent of almost a million square miles.

In a rebound from 2012's record low, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin.

The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes.

A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century.

If correct, it would contradict computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming. The news comes several years after the BBC predicted that the arctic would be ice-free by 2013.

Despite the original forecasts, major climate research centres now accept that there has been a “pause” in global warming since 1997.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/enviro ... tists.html