Climate Change - Blog Posts
The Climate Change Conspiracy
NO. 1
Climate Change is a widely talked about subject since the late 19th century. It is the rise of the average temperature on Earth’s climate system, and while there have been past periods of global warming, the rate it is going on right now is at an unprecedented level. But many conspiracy theorists believe that climate change must be a hoax, or has been invented for financial and ideological reasons. Human influence is obviously the largest contributor due to climate change or global warming, but ‘’allegations have been made that scientists and institutions involved in global warming research are part of a global scientific conspiracy or engaged in a manipulative hoax.
Climate change denial ‘is a latecomer to neoliberal anti-environmentalism, it is now become the countermovement’s pivotal issue in battles against environmental regulations. Neoliberals hold that the issue provides license for wholesale intervention everywhere. Anti-environmentalism has been, from the start, a keystone of neoliberal anti regulatory politics.’’ Many politicians, celebrities, and magazines have stated that climate change is a hoax, scam or elaborate conspiracy, and this is dangerous because it convinces the public that climate change is a hoax as well; especially because the more power a person has the more convincing they become.
NO. 2
Donald Trump, in 2012, has stated that, "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." Really? Climate change is not a scam created by a neighboring country, it is something real that affects everyone on the planet. ‘’The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that ‘human influence on climate has been the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century. These findings have been recognized by the national science academies of major nations and are not disputed by any scientific body of national or international standing. Impacts include the extinction or relocation of many species as their ecosystems change, most immediately in coral reefs, mountains, and the Arctic.’’
Unfortunately, economic stability will always be the reason for ignoring or abusing the environment. Conspirators and those who deny climate change will also see it as changing the jobs they’ve taken, the lives they’ve led, and the politicians they’ve followed, not to mention that getting the American public to understand and care about climate change is a challenge, even with the many conspiracies out there. ‘’Reeling from conservative attacks over liberal bias, ‘mainstream media’, seeking ‘editorial balance,’ often grant parity to ‘climate skeptic’ news releases and policy papers, from right-wing think tanks and their bought experts and pundits, with peer-reviewed science. Having increased leverage in recessions and periods of economic insecurity, many Americans are receptive to conservative views--that regulating fuel efficiency, and thereby vehicle size weight, increases energy prices and taxes ‘kills jobs,’ violates freedom of choice and threatens overall liberty.’’
NO. 3
The way the media frames climate change doesn’t help inform people either on how to safely combat climate change, where every frame somehow includes a doomsday scenario, so much that it disempowers how people will react, and respond. Tropical storms, rising oceans, heat waves, reduction of snow and ice, and high carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will only increase if we choose to do nothing and believe that the science is wrong. When Hurricane Irma hit Houston, it showed real life consequences to climate change--as ocean temperatures increase, more hurricanes will become more severe and catastrophic. But those who reported and interviewed people, mainly conservatives who deny or deflect climate change is in the wrong for even presenting that to their audience. ‘’Those supplying the media with information--scientists, politicians, and NGO’s--share some of the blame. The way they media frame climate change will affect how audiences respond. Challenges include making stories more relevant to audiences, raising the profile of adaption and the perspectives of the poor, and reporting on ways to address climate change that brings additional benefits.’’
Conspiracies have the ability to be fun, cause drama, and bring people together---they can also bring disarray and be wildly inaccurate. They can also be dangerous to the general public for fueling theories over science; climate change is real, and whether these theorists believe it or not, is based on whether or not human influence. We have the power to change the way the world has become.
can we get a post going of environmental/conservation progress lately (especially outside of the USA). it can feel so defeating and it’s easy to burn out when you’re surrounded by all the negatives
Move along, nothing to see here. Just blizzards in Florida + record snowfall in Mississippi and Louisiana + climate change.
Please pray for our brothers and sisters in California.
Our Heavenly Father,
May You send heavy rainclouds to California to pour out and extinguish the fires, and stop the winds.
May You save all the people, trees and animals in the area from danger and loss.
May God's mightiest angels protect every brother and sister in Christ from harm.
May You show Your unending love and mercy to those who love You and spare this city.
In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.
Facts About Australian Food Production and Supply
Discover interesting facts about Australian food production and supply with the help of this article. Farmers in Australia produce more food than the nation consumed. As a result, 65-70 percent of the production is exported to other countries.
Visit this article by Entegra Signature Structures to know about Australian food production and food consumption. In this article, we have also mentioned the amount of food supplied by Australia to other countries.
This is a bad tweet
So before I go into why, I want to make clear that I'm pro-solar for a lot of reasons, I own a couple panels, I think we should do more of it, etc. etc. and I'll talk more about this at the end of the post.
But basically there's a couple reasons why solar can be problematic for an electrical grid.
Reason one is exactly what the MIT article said, the peak generation is not exactly aligned with the rhythms of power use. For the most part in the current electrical grid you have to use power at the same time as you make it, or it is lost forever. If you want to use the energy you made in the middle of the day in the evening, tough luck! Fortunately there's a lot of work going towards grid scale power storage, but each method has tradeoffs:
- batteries: biggest issue is just that we're not making enough of them. We need orders of magnitude more to do grid-level storage. They're cheap enough that a lot of people can afford a house battery now (although that can cause other issues) but the grid is very large. There's also some issues around lithium extraction (do we have enough? Can we do it in a way that's not an environmental disaster?) but overall they're still better than fossil fuels so. Alternative chemistries (like flow batteries and iron batteries) are in the works but they're years from being grid ready so at the moment batteries means lithium.
- pumped storage: Pump water uphill using power in the day, let it flow downhill at night (or whenever there's a need) to generate power. Stupid simple, uses the same tech as a dam. The main issue with this is that you need a place to put all that water high up next to a place where you can put a lot of water low down, so you need to be in the mountains, and you need to be okay with flooding somewhere (maybe two somewheres) to hold all that water. You can't just plop it down anywhere like a battery. It's expensive to site a massive dam project. Luckily it's possible to retrofit some existing dams with pumps to store power, but this is still rare.
- Hydrogen: Use energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then recombine it in a fuel cell to get the power back sometime later. Hydrogen is neat because you can store it and move it somewhere else (say, to power a ship) but it's flammable, can move through metal, needs to be kept cold, and the electrolysis process is very inefficient with current tech. Oh and also oil companies are using it for greenwashing because right now most hydrogen is made from methane, which is very not green.
There are ways to "cheat" without storage, like running certain industries that can ramp up and down quickly only when there's an excess of power, but that means you've got stuff sitting around idle much of the time and not every industry can stop and start that quickly.
Currently we use stuff like coal (not as common in the US anymore), hydro, or nuclear to provide a baseload that runs all the time and let solar/methane/wind handle the peaks. If you have so much solar you're generating most of your power by it in the daytime, that can cause an issue for nuclear since those plants take hours to ramp up and down. Hydro as baseload can be easily ramped (also to follow peaks) but since it provides seasonal storage and minimum flow for water there can be limitations during certain parts of the year.
Reason two is that solar is also an example of a distributed power source. Traditionally, the power company makes power in one place and then sends it out to many other places. The grid is designed with this (more or less) one way flow in mind. But if a significant fraction of houses now have a few panels on the roof this flow pattern gets reversed, and now you may need to retrofit lines or add new ones. You also need to consider stuff like, if the grid goes down is there a way to let neighborhoods run isolated if they have independent generation? It can be done, but somebody needs to plan it, put up switches to turn stuff off, etc. But since a lot of households aren't paying for power anymore (since they have their own solar) or are even receiving money, who is paying for these infrastructure changes? It's not realistic to expect everyone to ditch the grid install solar and a battery either, because the capital cost is still relatively steep for a whole house system (although it pays off quickly and the price is getting cheaper all the time), and we also have stuff like steel production on the grid which really can't generate power locally (or be integrated into a neighborhood).
Another option is to send power really far, because while generation is peaking in California use might be peaking in NYC, so if you can send energy cross-country (or even between continents) you can better take advantage of the peak. There are already some large interconnect projects under construction in the US, but they're expensive and take a long time. Doing something like sending energy from the US to Europe (or vice versa) could be a way to distribute excess ultracheap solar energy, but we're a long way from doing that.
A lot of power companies are making bad choices in response, doing stuff like banning new home solar (yikes) or require people to pay a minimum fee even if they're totally disconnected from the grid. Having a separate "grid maintenance" fee and "power generation" fee might be one option and some companies are doing this but I don't claim to have the answer. IMO it's a good thing companies are starting to feel backed into a corner by solar, it means that adoption is actually becoming significant relative to total generation!
So while corporate greed is 100% a factor in this, the truth is a lot more complicated. The power grid is one of the most complex systems humans manage while also being one of the most critical to our continued existence. All of its components have to work together in a delicate balance all day, all year.
But to circle back around, we're going to have to figure this stuff out and quick if we want to stop global warming. There is no perfect solution to power generation, we're going to need to do solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, tidal, etc. and we're going to have to reshape the grid to make it happen. Solar has huge benefits and even with the cost of storage it's still cheaper than a lot of fossil fuels. Having excess generation capacity before we have storage figured out isn't necessarily a bad thing, either.
My power company has a "green power" option which (due to the laws of physics) can't guarantee all green electrons to my outlets but it does fund buildout of infrastructure for renewables. Some companies just use this kind of thing as a greenwashing slush fund so definitely research where the money actually goes, and it's understandable if you can afford a larger power bill.
I'm a fan of nationalization of energy infrastructure to remove the profit motive and make subsidization of new infrastructure more palatable. There's probably a lot of different ways to make this work and we're going to have to "yes and" our way through it. There's have been some pretty big successes in running moderate scale grids on renewables and I hope to see that continue and expand.
This is a bad tweet because it pushes an oversimplified reaction which just serves to get you mad. It's an easy sell because power companies can be some of the most ghoulish out there (see: Texas cold snap surge pricing) and there's a kernel of truth (power companies would absolutely like to monopolize solar, which they have successfully done in some regions).
It's worth noting that a lot of this policy is being decided at the state and local level. You can make a big difference by getting in contact with your state government and telling them this is a priority, as well as voting for people with a forward-thinking energy policy. It may feel like your vote goes nowhere but these elections are often decided by thousands, hundreds, or even tens of votes so you can absolutely make a difference.
Washington post article link
A landslide in Greenland created a 650 foot megatsunami and the wave made a seiche in the fjord that lasted for 9 days! The seiche created a mystery seismic signal detected worldwide.
I'm pretty sure that's the second largest wave recorded in history behind Lituya Bay (depending on how you measure stuff). That's taller than the space needle!
It seems like the slide may have been destabilized by glacier melt due to accelerating warming in Greenland.
Climate scientists say we will exceed the 1.5°C temperature threshold for the first time in 2024. “The limits that were set in the Paris agreement are starting to crumble given the too-slow pace of climate action across the world.” A grim milestone.
Flooded Brazil 'ghost town' a climate warning to world, UN advisor says
Record floods that killed over 170 people and displaced half a million in southern Brazil are a warning sign of more disasters to come throughout the Americas because of climate change, an official at the United Nations' refugee agency said on Tuesday.
Roughly 389,000 people, opens new tab in the state of Rio Grande do Sul remain displaced from their homes because of the intense rain and flooding, which local officials say was the worst disaster in the region's history. Scientists say climate change made the flooding twice as likely to happen.
Andrew Harper, special advisor on climate action to the refugee agency UNHCR, visited a flooded neighborhood in state capital Porto Alegre over the weekend and called it "a ghost town."
"It was underwater for almost 40 days. There wasn't even any rats running around. Everything had died," Harper said in an interview on Tuesday.
Continue reading.
What is Climate?
Climate is a long-term state that helps us predict our weather. For example, Florida’s climate isn’t going to be anything like Alaska’s. We know, as Floridians, that our climate here is sub-tropical. Our proximity to the equator and the fact that we are almost completely surrounded by water means that we typically have warmer, wetter weather. Climate is long-term and weather is short-term. Even though Florida can get the occasional cold front and thus cold weather, we know that it will eventually give way to warmer weather. Our tropical climate here in Florida is the reason we can go swimming in December.
What is climate change?
Climate change typically refers to the Earth’s total climate. Since climate is such a long-term, broad concept, it can take a lot of things and a really long time to drastically change it. However, the effects of climate change can be felt as they gradually increase overtime. For example, there were more named storms in 2020 than in any previous recorded year.
What is causing climate change?
Historically, Earth’s climate has always gradually changed over time. What’s new is the rate at which our climate is changing. Climate scientists believe this rapid change is due to the massive increase in burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. Burning fossil fuels for energy to power our homes, jobs, and cars releases gas into the atmosphere. The same atmosphere that traps air for us to breathe has been trapping the increased amounts of fossil fuels which is causing a massive shift in how we experience climate and weather.
What can I do?
Learning is always the first step. Making educated decisions for yourself and your family is the best way to move forward in any given scenario. Climate change is no different. Take the time to learn more and share the knowledge. Pasted below is a list of reliable resources on climate change.
NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/what-is-climate-change-k4.html
United Nations (UN): https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/climate-change/
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA): https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/climate/climate-change-impacts
Check out part 1 of our Climate Change interview with Coral Springs Commissioner Nancy Metayer https://anchor.fm/snc-wild/episodes/Interview-with-Commissioner-Metayer-Part--I-eqtv93
Join SNC staff in our discussion on Climate Change!
1 rose has a carbon emissions of 1.8. One banana has a carbon emissions of 0.11.
Don’t buy roses, BUY BANANAS!!!!
No paywall version here.
"Two and a half years ago, when I was asked to help write the most authoritative report on climate change in the United States, I hesitated...
In the end, I said yes, but reluctantly. Frankly, I was sick of admonishing people about how bad things could get. Scientists have raised the alarm over and over again, and still the temperature rises. Extreme events like heat waves, floods and droughts are becoming more severe and frequent, exactly as we predicted they would. We were proved right. It didn’t seem to matter.
Our report, which was released on Tuesday, contains more dire warnings. There are plenty of new reasons for despair. Thanks to recent scientific advances, we can now link climate change to specific extreme weather disasters, and we have a better understanding of how the feedback loops in the climate system can make warming even worse. We can also now more confidently forecast catastrophic outcomes if global emissions continue on their current trajectory.
But to me, the most surprising new finding in the Fifth National Climate Assessment is this: There has been genuine progress, too.
I’m used to mind-boggling numbers, and there are many of them in this report. Human beings have put about 1.6 trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution — more than the weight of every living thing on Earth combined. But as we wrote the report, I learned other, even more mind-boggling numbers. In the last decade, the cost of wind energy has declined by 70 percent and solar has declined 90 percent. Renewables now make up 80 percent of new electricity generation capacity. Our country’s greenhouse gas emissions are falling, even as our G.D.P. and population grow.
In the report, we were tasked with projecting future climate change. We showed what the United States would look like if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius. It wasn’t a pretty picture: more heat waves, more uncomfortably hot nights, more downpours, more droughts. If greenhouse emissions continue to rise, we could reach that point in the next couple of decades. If they fall a little, maybe we can stave it off until the middle of the century. But our findings also offered a glimmer of hope: If emissions fall dramatically, as the report suggested they could, we may never reach 2 degrees Celsius at all.
For the first time in my career, I felt something strange: optimism.
And that simple realization was enough to convince me that releasing yet another climate report was worthwhile.
Something has changed in the United States, and not just the climate. State, local and tribal governments all around the country have begun to take action. Some politicians now actually campaign on climate change, instead of ignoring or lying about it. Congress passed federal climate legislation — something I’d long regarded as impossible — in 2022 as we turned in the first draft.
[Note: She's talking about the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act, which despite the names were the two biggest climate packages passed in US history. And their passage in mid 2022 was a big turning point: that's when, for the first time in decades, a lot of scientists started looking at the numbers - esp the ones that would come from the IRA's funding - and said "Wait, holy shit, we have an actual chance."]
And while the report stresses the urgency of limiting warming to prevent terrible risks, it has a new message, too: We can do this. We now know how to make the dramatic emissions cuts we’d need to limit warming, and it’s very possible to do this in a way that’s sustainable, healthy and fair.
The conversation has moved on, and the role of scientists has changed. We’re not just warning of danger anymore. We’re showing the way to safety.
I was wrong about those previous reports: They did matter, after all. While climate scientists were warning the world of disaster, a small army of scientists, engineers, policymakers and others were getting to work. These first responders have helped move us toward our climate goals. Our warnings did their job.
To limit global warming, we need many more people to get on board... We need to reach those who haven’t yet been moved by our warnings. I’m not talking about the fossil fuel industry here; nor do I particularly care about winning over the small but noisy group of committed climate deniers. But I believe we can reach the many people whose eyes glaze over when they hear yet another dire warning or see another report like the one we just published.
The reason is that now, we have a better story to tell. The evidence is clear: Responding to climate change will not only create a better world for our children and grandchildren, but it will also make the world better for us right now.
Eliminating the sources of greenhouse gas emissions will make our air and water cleaner, our economy stronger and our quality of life better. It could save hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives across the country through air quality benefits alone. Using land more wisely can both limit climate change and protect biodiversity. Climate change most strongly affects communities that get a raw deal in our society: people with low incomes, people of color, children and the elderly. And climate action can be an opportunity to redress legacies of racism, neglect and injustice.
I could still tell you scary stories about a future ravaged by climate change, and they’d be true, at least on the trajectory we’re currently on. But it’s also true that we have a once-in-human-history chance not only to prevent the worst effects but also to make the world better right now. It would be a shame to squander this opportunity. So I don’t just want to talk about the problems anymore. I want to talk about the solutions. Consider this your last warning from me."
-via New York Times. Opinion essay by leading climate scientist Kate Marvel. November 18, 2023.
So many people do not understand the relationship between climate change and cold weather.
"Do you ever feel like everything in the world is just getting worse?"
You weren’t there on the mountain
when its last glacier melted,
You weren’t there in the river
when it’s water ran empty,
You weren’t there by the ocean
when it’s body rested over much of the land.
You didn’t watch the dying happen, but nonetheless, it happened. And one sunny day, when the skyscrapers stand hollow, and the cars don’t run, and the world’s heart has beat its last,
You won’t be there.
there have been more than 300 fires in the whole country this month
Colombia is burning
DR ADAM LEVY ClimateAdam ROSEMARY MOSCO
His movement, his story, his heartbreak, everything. This was just so beautifully done and moving. You cannot hate him or this speech
Climate Change Science is Conclusive, and Here’s What You Can Do about It
In a recent study containing over four decades of satellite data (https://www.bloomberg.com/…/climate-change-is-disrupting-th…), researchers concluded that the odds that climate change is occurring naturally without human influence are approximately 5/ 1,000,000 or 0.0005 percent.
In any other peer-reviewed scientific study this would be regarded as very convincing evidence that our climate change is anthropogenic; however, American society, in particular, allows non-scientific members of our community speak with emotionally-guided or overly-simplistic (https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/does-trump-even-know-tha…/…) rhetoric on whether or not this is science we should consider.
Whether or not scientific data is comforting to you has no bearing on whether or not the data in question is conclusive.
It is disheartening to me, as a science major heading toward graduation and a future where I hope American politics adequately represent me, to know that my fellow citizens are swayed by unwarranted, snowball-in-congress (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E0a_60PMR8) arguments that are actually funded by people who benefit from hiding climate change evidence (https://www.scientificamerican.com/…/dark-money-funds-clim…/). Even though it may be profitable for now to pursue business practices that harm the environment and cause climate change, it will be more expensive for our society to pay for the damage done to our land in the future. We will, as a society, eventually have to pay for the citizens who need emergency treatment for asthma, illness from contaminated water and air, and heat complications. There are greater storm risks with climate change, and we, as a society, will have to pay more for emergencies that could have been prevented (https://www.researchgate.net/…/links/5566497208aeccd77735a1…). If companies are not paying for environmentally-protective practices now, society will be paying their debt in the future-- plain and simple.
Information confirming climate change is particularly disarming when one considers debts we cannot pay back. For example, irreversible changes to interspecies interactions are caused by climate change. For example, plant-pollinator interactions rely on seasonal temperatures and daylight hours to ensure that when plants are ready to be pollinated, bees are also ready to pollinate. Often plants' perception of season relies on hours of sunlight. If a plant species receives an ideal time of daylight, morphological changes occur to initiate plant flowering or fruit development. Climate change does not alter the hours of daylight for plants, so they develop on their typical timeframe (not taking greenhouse gas concentration and temperature changes into account). On the other hand, the plant pollinators like bees rely on temperature changes to represent a seasonal change to signal when they should pollinate plants. Because temperatures prematurely rise in the progress of a year due to anthropogenic climate change, bees are prematurely signalled to start pollination for plants when the plants are not ready to be pollinated. This is called a phenological mismatch. When bees are ready to pollinate before plants are in their pollination season, bee populations are devastated on a large scale because they do not have access to nectar and pollen that they need to survive. The phenological mismatch also reduces the reproductive success of the plants to which the bees are co-adapted (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/…/…/j.1461-0248.2008.01269.x). Phenological mismatches caused by climate change are not exclusive to plant-bee interactions; this is just one of many examples.
Here's what you can do to fight climate change, as is: - make it known to you local legislator that climate change is an important issue to you (a link to find your local legislator: https://gov.oregonlive.com/legislators/) - donate to climate scientists, political action groups, or whatever group you like and feel like represent you best ( I prefer Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Union of Concerned Scientists, etc.) - be a smart consumer (http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/…/15_B.Reformat_The_idea_of_smart_s… or https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10603-012-9188-7) - talk about this issue with others (helpful ways to discuss this issue with others: https://www.theatlantic.com/…/how-to-talk-about-cli…/375067/) - read more and gain a better understanding of the issue to form your own opinion (here's more information on critical thinking to sort through which literature is good literature: https://www.criticalthinking.org/files/Concepts_Tools.pdf) - other tips for fighting the good fight: https://davidsuzuki.org/…/top-10-ways-can-stop-climate-ch…/… https://www.weforum.org/…/how-to-talk-about-climate-change…/ https://www.nrdc.org/…/how-you-can-help-fight-climate-change
TL;DR: Climate change is anthropogenic. If companies do not invest in environmentally-safe practices in the status quo (because we as consumers and constituents do not let them know it is an important issue), taxes will have to cover the costs (with interest) in the future. However, some costs can never be paid back-- like, if entire bee species go extinct.
Why do so many people hate Olivia because of this comment? 🙈 It would be better if Taylor's PR shitshow focused on the climate crisis instead of the NFL... right!? 🤷
Olivia is a very close friend of Dianna. Do you know what I am talking about? 😉
