Seemorerocks: A New Year message and climate change miscellany

A New Year message

Seemorerocks

New Year's Day is a good day to reflect on what's important - and what's not.

There are a lot of people who are chasing after stories that I can only all peripheral.
I can only recommend that they listen to these words of the late Mike Ruppert from last New Year. If you have heard this before, I suggest you listen again and really internalise what is being said.

As time goes on and it becomes more and more evident that we are locked into a spiral of abrupt and castastrophic climate change; the collapse of the infinite growth myth and of human civilisation; of a human species that is moving to destroy itself through the release of nuclear ionising radiation and war.

This has made me less tolerant of debate about peripheral issues and more and more understanding of Mike Ruppert's shortness and irritation at people who refused to see the wood for the trees.

Just today I have had someone say that they INSIST on a discussion of geoengineering (in particular HAARP, which they think is being used to melt the Arctic.

Well, it doesn't really matter any more, does it?

Anthropogenic climate change has now triggered processes that are self-feeding, so that climate change is no longer purely anthropogenic any more. If we stopped putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere (which is a bit like hoping the cow's going to jump over the mean) it will be to little avail.

The genie's out of the bottle.

So, I am saying - I will not engage in such discussion any more.

I am quite capable of looking at distractions (and, indeed, post them on this blog) but I do not - even for a single moment - lose иsight what is important.

----Seemorerocks

I will leave you with these comments on Facebook from climate scientist Jason Box, expressing his own irritation with the nonsense that goes down at sites like Climate Change Discussion

It's pretty clear to me as a professional scientist there are a lot of folk in this Facebook group:

a.) grasping scientifically lame reasons there is no human induced climate problem. I mean denying elevated CO2 causes warming is pretty ignorant of basic physics;

b.) ideologically against regulation in any form and through that lens grasping pseudoskepticism;

c.) sadists who take joy from throwing verbal daggers;

d.) invoking conspiracy theories to brush aside difficult truths. meanwhile, outside of this smelly back alley of the internet, people are actually making the world better for our kids and more prosperous through energy technology that does not choke the air, give cancer, burn the Gulf of Mexico, etc.

---Jason Box

Here are a few more articles and bits and pieces.
More records go down....

Seventeen U.S. Cities on Track for Hottest Year

Climate Central,

30 December, 2014

The globe is on track for its warmest year on record. But global average temperature watchers won't be the only ones feting record heat when the clock strikes midnight on Wednesday. A number of U.S. urban areas will also join in the record-setting festivities while not a single major urban area will be raising a glass to record cold. In fact, it's been nearly 30 years since a major U.S. city had a record cold year.

Climate Central conducted analysis of the 125 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. (though 11 were weeded out due to insufficient data), which showed that 17 are slated to have their hottest year on record. Every metro area primed for a record warm year sits to the west of the Rockies. The heat follows Interstate 5 from Seattle down through Portland, Sacramento and San Diego with detours to San Francisco, Fresno and Modesto before heading east to Las Vegas, Phoenix, Reno and Tucson. Salt Lake City, Los Angeles and El Paso are among other western metro areas also in line for one of their top 5 warmest years.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the five states with record-setting cities — Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington — are all on track for one of their top 5 warmest years. Of those five states, California has 10 of the 17 hottest cities, in part because it's such a huge urban state, but also because the heat there has been so extreme this year. As of November, the state was running about 2°F above its previous hottest year, a surprisingly high margin in a world where temperature records are usually set by tenths or hundredths of degrees. Some Californian metro areas such as Bakersfield and Vallejo also beat their previous high records by about 2°F while the Santa Maria-Santa Barbara area is set to beat its old record by nearly 3°F.

The heat in the western U.S. come courtesy of a big ridge of high pressure that's been in parked in place for a chunk of the year, trapping warm weather. That pattern has turbocharged California's drought and some research has tied the development and longevity of that ridge to climate change.

THE HOT 17
Click each metro area to see how 2014 stacks up

Arizona: Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, Tucson
California: Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto, Sacramento-Roseville-Arden-Arcade, Salinas,San Diego-Carlsbad, San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, Stockton-Lodi,Vallejo-Fairfield, Visalia-Porterville
Nevada: Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, Reno
Oregon: Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro
Washington: Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue

The 17 metro areas that will set records in 2014 have a population of 28.5 million, or about 9 percent of the U.S. population. In comparison, the metro areas that set a cold record this year are home to a population of exactly zero.

Not a single urban area in the U.S. experienced record cold, despite the cold air outbreaks that froze much of the East for the first few months of the year. Some metro areas, such Kansas City, Mo., and Fayetville, Ark., are headed for a top 10 coldest year, but most major cities east of the Mississippi had just cool or near-average temperatures.

It's been 29 years since any urban area in the U.S. has notched a record cold year. The last metro area to feel the big chill? That would be a three-way tie between Kansas City, Mo., Spokane, Wash., and Boise City, Idaho, in 1985. That year, incidentally, is also the last time the globe experienced a colder-than-average month, with February 1985 taking the honors.

And when it comes to global record coldest year, you'd have to go back even further. Way further in fact. It's been over a century since the world's coldest year on record with 1909 setting the record and 1911 tying it.

Going back to 1880 — the year recordkeeping began — the global average temperature has risen by 1.5°F. In the U.S., temperatures have risen about 2°F since 1895 with a large portion of that rise coming since 1970. That rise in temperatures has also helped increase the number of daily record highs set compared to record lows. If greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, the U.S. average temperature could climb up to another 10°F by the end of the 21st century.

The ocean is swallowing up parts of Virginia....

The ocean is swallowing up Virginia so rapidly that its leaders are forgetting to bicker about climate change

Telesur,

31 December, 2014

The usual US partisan divisions over climate change were absent today in the state of Virginia, where Republican and Democratic officials met to discuss what to do about the threat of rising sea levels to the state. The proposals include the launch of a climate-change task force, which Virginia’s Democratic governor will announce tomorrow. Christina DeConcini, government affairs director at the World Resources Institute, a research organization, told Quartz this is the first time to her knowledge that Republican leaders (very few of whom accept global warming is both real and man-made) and Democratic ones have come together to craft a policy on global warming.

That’s probably because Virginia is more vulnerable to storm-surge destruction than anywhere else on the US’s east coast. Problems are particularly acute in Norfolk, Virginia’s second-biggest city and home to the world’s largest naval base; sea levels there are now 14.5 inches (37 cm) higher than they were in 1930—so high that parts of Norfolk flood when the moon is full. Sea levels are rising faster there than anywhere else along the coast, due to the vagaries of ocean currents:

Sewells Point is a peninsula off Norfolk."(Natural Resources Defense Council)

“A severe Category 2 or a Category 3 storm—if we were to receive a direct hit, almost all of the city would be underwater,” Paul Fraim, Norfolk’s mayor, told National Public Radio in 2012.

This doesn’t mean that high tide is lapping at Virginians’ front doors. The main danger comes when storms pummel the coasts with huge waves, which are amplified by tidal forces. Here’s an illustration of how high tides and storm surges, as they’re called, differ:

("Virginia Hurricane Evacuation Guide")

As you can see in the chart below, huge storm surges are becoming more frequent. (Also not shown here is the 5.17 foot surge from Hurricane Sandy in 2012):

(Natural Resources Defense Council)

Worse, scientists expect sea levels in southern Virginia to rise at least a foot (30 cm) and perhaps as much as three feet by 2060. Moreover, that’s only accounting for the sea-level rise. Factoring in subsidence—sinking land—Virginia’s tides could be eight feet higher by 2100 in some areas, according to a study by Virginia Institute of Marine Science, with about six of those feet from sea-level alone.

This is a big problem for coastal Virginia given that the military, tourism and its ports generate a hefty share of the state’s economic output, as well as hundreds of thousands of jobs. Homeowners and insurers, however, are likely to sustain the biggest blow. A three-foot rise in sea-levels would inundate the homes of between 59,000 and 176,000 Virginia residents, according to WRI.

(Hampton Roads Planning District Commission\

But these nightmare scenarios aren’t confined to Virginia alone; they’re very much a national-level threat. Coastal counties generate just under half of US GDP and support tens of millions of jobs. In the 18 states that abut the Atlantic, the insured value of residential and commercial property totals $10.6 trillion; New York and Florida account for $2.9 trillion apiece. Whether leaders in other states can put aside partisan differences and follow Virginia’s lead, however, is another question.