The warming of planet Earth

[Kraken]

CA adopts Cap'n Trade

SAN FRANCISCO - California adopted the nation’s most comprehensive “cap-and-trade’’ system yesterday, an experiment by the world’s eighth-largest economy that is designed to provide financial incentives for polluters to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

We will find out within a few years if it's the job creator that proponents claim or the job destroyer that opponents warn about. Or (most likely) something in between.

[naednek]

CA adopts Cap'n Trade

SAN FRANCISCO - California adopted the nation’s most comprehensive “cap-and-trade’’ system yesterday, an experiment by the world’s eighth-largest economy that is designed to provide financial incentives for polluters to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

We will find out within a few years if it's the job creator that proponents claim or the job destroyer that opponents warn about. Or (most likely) something in between.

And it's my main job to make sure their servers and access is always up

[Holman]

And it's my main job to make sure their servers and access is always up

Wow. So you have, like, the ability to (destroy/save) the (planet/economy) depending on whether you keep the servers (down/up).

[Pyperkub]

Naednek, the first sysadmin busted for embezzling carbon credits!

Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk

[noxiousdog]

CA adopts Cap'n Trade

SAN FRANCISCO - California adopted the nation’s most comprehensive “cap-and-trade’’ system yesterday, an experiment by the world’s eighth-largest economy that is designed to provide financial incentives for polluters to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

We will find out within a few years if it's the job creator that proponents claim or the job destroyer that opponents warn about. Or (most likely) something in between.

California has an advantage in that it can import power and refining capacity. Should be good for Oregon at the very least.

[Rip]

Go Canada.

Canada is formally withdrawing from the Kyoto accord, Environment Minister Peter Kent said Monday.

The decision to do so will save the government an estimated $14 billion in penalties, Kent said. The Conservative government says it has no choice given the economic situation.

Blaming an "incompetent Liberal government" who signed the accord and then took little action to make the necessary greenhouse gas emission cuts, Kent said he was formalizing what the Conservative government has been saying for weeks.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2 ... llout.html

[Zarathud]

Canada realizes that it could benefit from a little global warming.

[Canuck]

Canada-what a horrible, horrible country.

[Enough]

NASA finds 2011 the ninth-warmest on record since 1880. The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000.

Check out the linked time-lapse video.

[Enough]

There's a major new global study in Nature on melting ice and it's being reported everywhere with headlines blaring that scientists are stunned, feeling duped as the Himalayas lost no ice in the last decade, etc. So nothing to worry about, the study clearly shows ice melt ain't no biggee and is just another invention of big science right? Wrong,

"Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year," said Prof John Wahr of the University of Colorado. "People should be just as worried about the melting of the world's ice as they were before."

His team's study, published in the journal Nature, concludes that between 443-629bn tonnes of meltwater overall are added to the world's oceans each year. This is raising sea level by about 1.5mm a year, the team reports, in addition to the 2mm a year caused by expansion of the warming ocean.

The scientists are careful to point out that lower-altitude glaciers in the Asian mountain ranges – sometimes dubbed the "third pole" – are definitely melting. Satellite images and reports confirm this. But over the study period from 2003-10 enough ice was added to the peaks to compensate.

The impact on predictions for future sea level rise is yet to be fully studied but Bamber said: "The projections for sea level rise by 2100 will not change by much, say 5cm or so, so we are talking about a very small modification." Existing estimates range from 30cm to 1m.

[Grifman]

There's a major new global study in Nature on melting ice and it's being reported everywhere with headlines blaring that scientists are stunned, feeling duped as the Himalayas lost no ice in the last decade, etc.

I'm not worried about the Himalayas, it's Greenland I'm worried about. It's a pretty well established fact that we are losing ice there, perhaps faster than anticipated. The Himalayan glaciers are a drop in the literal ocean compared with Greenland.

[Enough]

There's a major new global study in Nature on melting ice and it's being reported everywhere with headlines blaring that scientists are stunned, feeling duped as the Himalayas lost no ice in the last decade, etc.

I'm not worried about the Himalayas, it's Greenland I'm worried about. It's a pretty well established fact that we are losing ice there, perhaps faster than anticipated. The Himalayan glaciers are a drop in the literal ocean compared with Greenland.

Right. Unfortunately the way Drudge and many others are presenting this study it will lead to more people writing off climate change as a big science fraud when that's not what the study says at all.

[Pyperkub]

Leak of Heartland Institute's Memos regarding funding of anti-climate change science, and coal industry reps writing K-12 Classroom plans:

Internal documents have been leaked from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago nonprofit think tank, showing its funding of leading skeptics of global warming and a plan to teach climate change skepticism in schools. An anonymous person leaked the documents to several publications and activists supporting the science of climate change. ...

...The documents show a plan to develop a curriculum for teaching about climate change in K-12 schools, focusing on the message that "the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain -- two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science."

[Pyperkub]

One other note from the 2012 plan (contested but being stood behind by the recipients of the leak):

(Typed from pdf scan)

At present we sponsor the NIPCC to undermine the official United Nations IPCC and paid a team of writers $388,000 to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered...

Not paid to re-evaluate, but paid to undermine.

[Isgrimnur]

Heartland leaker revealed:

Now, the leaker has outed himself: Peter Gleick, a research scientist with the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security, which among other things investigates the impact of hydrology on human health and how climate change plays into it.

In his admission, Gleick says he initially received the Institute’s internal documents in the mail anonymously. Given their potential impact, he tried to confirm their reality. How he did so, though, is something of an issue:

In an effort to [confirm the accuracy of the documents], and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name.

In other words, Gleick used a false identity to get more information from Heartland itself. This is an interesting situation, to say the least. I’ll note that faking an identity is not necessarily wrong or illegal. And if there is a greater moral good involved, like exposing dirty dealings on issues that have a major impact on people’s lives — say — it might even be understandable. On the other hand, if he impersonated someone real, then this may be a situation of identity theft. There’s also the question of whether he did everything he could to find out the veracity of the documents before taking the path he did. I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t have all the information, so I don’t really have an opinion on this. On the other hand I have very little doubt that how people come down on this point will depend very strongly on where they stand on the reality of climate change.

However, how he obtained this information is not really the point. The information on those documents and their veracity is paramount

I disagree with Phil. The manner in which this information is obtained is certainly worthy of discussion. It gives those that consider climate change scientists to be dishonest even more ammunition in their battles.

Heartland has certainly not done very well in their behavior either:

When these documents were posted, Heartland started threatening the sites hosting them, as well as bloggers who wrote about them including a 71-year-old veteran). This part is very important: Heartland has made repeated claims that the strategy paper is a fake.
...
However, there are things we do indeed know. One is that the Heartland Institute has a long history of climate change denial. Another is that they were huge cheerleaders of the manufactured Climategate nonsense, involving stolen emails from real scientists, but threatened to sue bloggers when their own documents were exposed in this very similar way. This reaction by Heartland is very telling, in my opinion.

But to say that the method used is not relevant isn't something I ever expect a scientist to say.

[GreenGoo]

But to say that the method used is not relevant isn't something I ever expect a scientist to say.

Why?

Do you believe that obtaining the documents should have been done using scientific methodology? Or that that methodology has any relevance on the accuracy of the documentation?

[Isgrimnur]

No and sort of.

We expect that scientists are supposed to have ethics and go about doing things the right way. As for the relevancy of the information, the method in which it was obtained leaves the door open to otherwise impugning the releasing agent, much as all those courtroom dramas have taught me.

"If you lied to obtain the documents, how do we know you didn't fabricate them? You were lying then. Why should we believe that you're not lying now?"

[LawBeefaroni]

"If you lied to obtain the documents, how do we know you didn't fabricate them? You were lying then. Why should we believe that you're not lying now?"

In this case, the authenticity of the documents can easily be confirmed.

Besides, lying to obtain the documents is kind of counter to fabricating them. You wouldn't bother to obtain them if you were going to fake them.

I'm not arguing that what Gleick did was right or that what Plait says is correct but the fact that the documents were obtained under false pretenses doesn't render them irrelevant or any less damning.

[Isgrimnur]

I'm not implying that it does, but it sure does chum the waters of the discussion.

[Rip]

"If you lied to obtain the documents, how do we know you didn't fabricate them? You were lying then. Why should we believe that you're not lying now?"

In this case, the authenticity of the documents can easily be confirmed.

Besides, lying to obtain the documents is kind of counter to fabricating them. You wouldn't bother to obtain them if you were going to fake them.

I'm not arguing that what Gleick did was right or that what Plait says is correct but the fact that the documents were obtained under false pretenses doesn't render them irrelevant or any less damning.

Same can be said for all the documents disclosed via wikileaks.

[GreenGoo]

Same can be said for all the documents disclosed via wikileaks.

Agreed.

Or did you mean that as a negative?

[Pyperkub]

Kill the messenger if you don't like the message. This is SOP.

This makes me more likely to believe that the strategy document is real, and would be quite verifiable if the same document showed up in both emails (the leak and the alleged verification attempt).

[Rip]

Same can be said for all the documents disclosed via wikileaks.

Agreed.

Or did you mean that as a negative?

No, just noting as I think many people have a tendency to applaud one and condemn the other. On both sides of the issue. To me this is one of those cases that shows how many people think it is ok as long as it supports an argument they believe in.

I don't care for what was uncovered but hiding facts accomplishes nothing. The abuse of secrecy is a big threat to the secrets we really do need to keep. We have moved too far towards a society that makes things secret if in doubt instead of making prudent decisions on what things really deserve the secrecy we provide them.

In the end a lot of things are kept secret as long as they are more over the embarrassment that they were hidden or how long they were hidden for than actual good reasons to keep them secret.

[GreenGoo]

I can get behind that for the most part Rip.