human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
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When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024 is our annual report, published this year for the first time - 27 December, 2024
Every December, people ask us how severe the year’s extreme weather events were. To answer this question, we’ve partnered with Climate Central to produce a report that reviews some of the most significant events and highlights findings from our attribution studies. It also includes new analysis looking at the number of dangerous heat days added by climate change in 2024 and global resolutions for 2025 to work toward a safer, more sustainable world.
https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/when-risks-become-reality-extr
eme-weather-in-2024/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
another year of climate records broken
Yes.
But don't expect TPTB to change their power hungry, profit-seeking, warmaking ways any time soon.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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The American Oil Industry’s Playbook, Illustrated
By Mark Olalde, illustrations by Peter Arkle | Dec. 30, 2024
https://www.propublica.org/article/oil-orphan-wells-cleanup-playbook-s
iana-tom-ragsdale
The question of who pays for cleanup remains unanswered. Time and again, oil companies have offloaded their oldest wells. Their tactics are not written down in one place or peddled by a single law firm — but companies follow an unmistakable pattern. The strategy, which is legal if followed properly, has become such a tried-and-true endeavor that researchers and environmentalists dubbed it “the playbook.”
Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst with clean-energy-focused think tank the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, studies fossil fuel companies’ cleanup costs. “There’s almost a cheerleading squad for shedding your liabilities, like a snake sheds its skin and just slithers away,” he said.
Should you want to become an oil executive and try this strategy yourself, here’s how it works …
As you launch your business, begin by collecting subsidies, tax breaks and other incentives from the government to guarantee you can pump oil and gas profitably. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies total in the trillions each year, according to organizations such as the International Monetary Fund. (Fossil Fuel Subsidies Surged to Record $7 Trillion in 2023
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel-subsidies
-surged-to-record-7-trillion )
Next, start pumping and profiting.
As you set up your business, create layers of shell companies. Down the road, they’ll provide a firewall between you and your liabilities — key among them, cleanup costs.
Once oil and gas production slows, sell low-producing wells. Smaller drillers operating on thinner margins, known in the business as “scavenger companies,” will be happy to take them off your hands.
Rinse and repeat by selling wells as their profits slow to a trickle. They’ll be sold again to ever-smaller companies that teeter on the edge of insolvency. Maintenance and environmental stewardship will usually fall by the wayside as companies eke out a profit. Studies show that the number of environmental violations rises as wells pass to less-capitalized drillers. But these wells aren’t your problem any longer.
Pull any remaining profits before regulators hit you with violations and fines for your remaining wells that aren’t pumping and may be leaking.
Then, idle the wells — pausing production, but not plugging them or cleaning up — and walk away. Regulators are typically tasked with ensuring that as much oil as possible is pumped out of the ground, so rules allow wells to sit idle, instead of being plugged, in case prices surge and it becomes profitable to restart them. However, a study in California found that, after wells are inactive for only 10 months, there’s a 50-50 chance they will never produce again.
Regulators will likely grow tired of asking you to clean up your wells, but you can make the case for leaving them unplugged for now. Pitch grand plans, as other drillers have — maybe repurposing the wells for bitcoin mining, carbon sequestration or the synthesis of hydrogen fuel — that require the wells to remain open.
When regulators’ patience has reached its limit, remind them what will happen if they come down hard on you. Fines or other extra costs could force your business into bankruptcy, leaving your unplugged wells as orphans and taxpayers on the hook. Ask them if they want to be responsible for that catastrophe.
“The root of the problem is there’s no regulator of the oil industry across North America,” Boychuk said, adding that “the rule of law has never applied to oil and gas.”
When regulators finally act, declare bankruptcy. The Bankruptcy Code is meant to protect businesspeople like you who took risks. More than 250 oil and gas operators in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy protection between 2015 and 2021, according to law firm Haynes Boone. (Industry groups estimate there are several thousand oil companies in the co
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Climate Models Can’t Explain What’s Happening to Earth
Global warming is moving faster than the best models can keep a handle on.
By Zoë Schlanger | January 6, 2025, 1:41 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/01/climate-models-ear
th/681207/
Fifty years into the project of modeling Earth’s future climate, we still don’t really know what’s coming. Some places are warming with more ferocity than expected. Extreme events are taking scientists by surprise. Right now, as the bald reality of climate change bears down on human life, scientists are seeing more clearly the limits of our ability to predict the exact future we face. The coming decades may be far worse, and far weirder, than the best models anticipated.
This is a problem. The world has warmed enough that city planners, public-health officials, insurance companies, farmers, and everyone else in the global economy want to know what’s coming next for their patch of the planet. And telling them would require geographic precision that even the most advanced climate models don’t yet have, as well as computing power that doesn’t yet exist. Our picture of what is happening and probably will happen on Earth is less hazy than it’s ever been. Still, the exquisitely local scale on which climate change is experienced and the global purview of our best tools to forecast its effects simply do not line up.
Today’s climate models very accurately describe the broad strokes of Earth’s future. But warming has also now progressed enough that scientists are noticing unsettling mismatches between some of their predictions and real outcomes. Kai Kornhuber, a climate scientist at Columbia University, and his colleagues recently found that, on every continent except Antarctica, certain regions showed up as mysterious hot spots, suffering repeated heat waves worse than what any model could predict or explain. Across places where a third of humanity lives, actual daily temperature records are outpacing model predictions, according to forthcoming research from Dartmouth’s Alexander Gottlieb and Justin Mankin. And a global jump in temperature that lasted from mid-2023 to this past June remains largely unexplained, a fact that troubles Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, although it doesn’t entirely surprise him.
“From the 1970s on, people have understood that all models are wrong,” he told me. “But we’ve been working to make them more useful.” In that sense, the project of climate modeling is a scientific process that’s proceeding normally, even excellently. Only now the whole world needs very specific information to make crucial decisions, and they needed it, like, yesterday. That scientists don’t have those answers might look like a failure of modeling, but really, it’s a testament to how bad climate change has been permitted to get, and how quickly.
Models simply can’t function on the scale at which people live, because assessing the impact of current emissions on the future world requires hundreds of years of simulations. Modeling the Earth at one-square-kilometer pixels would take “like a hundred thousand times more computation than we currently have,” Schmidt, of NASA, told me.
Trees and land are major sinks for carbon emissions, and that this fact might change is not accounted for in climate models. But it is changing: Trees and land absorbed much less carbon than normal in 2023, according to research published last October. In Finland, forests have stopped absorbing the majority of the carbon they once did, and recently became a net source of emissions, which, as The Guardian has reported, swamped all gains the country has made in cutting emissions from all other sectors since the early 1990s. The interactions of the ice sheets with the oceans are also largely missing from models, Schmidt told me, despite the fact that melting ice could change ocean temperatures, which could have significant knock-on effects. Changing ocean-temperature patterns are currently making climate modelers at NOAA rethi
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2024 LNG Export Study: Energy, Economic, and Environmental Assessment of U.S. LNG Exports
https://fossil.energy.gov/app/docketindex/docket/index/30
The conclusions of the report are measured yet damning. The Department of Energy did not outright advise banning new exports of natural gas. But, as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm wrote in a statement, the department found that “unfettered exports” of American gas would reduce supply domestically, potentially driving up wholesale gas prices in the U.S. by more than 30 percent. The report also found that increasing LNG exports could generate 1.5 gigatons of direct greenhouse-gas emissions a year by 2050. That’s equivalent to about a quarter of current annual U.S. emissions, and would more than eclipse the emission reductions the country has made since 2000. If the department’s predictions are correct, the U.S. would be essentially abandoning any pretense of trying to limit climate change. The LNG industry has long countered that it can use carbon-capture technology to counteract its emissions. But that technology is far from functional at any meaningful scale. Even when the Energy Department researchers factored in hypothetical “aggressive” use of carbon capture and storage, emissions were projected to rise.
In the report, the Biden administration also says that its original argument for LNG exports—that Europe needed the gas for energy security during the Russian war with Ukraine—has fallen apart. Demand in Europe is plateauing and is expected to decline, and instead, the increased exports from the U.S. would mostly go to benefit China, already the world’s largest LNG importer, Granholm wrote. This has long been pointed out by LNG’s opponents; it is striking to see the facts laid out by the federal government. The continued pace of LNG exports is “neither sustainable nor advisable,” Granholm wrote.
The DOE report makes clear that liquefied natural gas is neither a form of clean energy nor a bridge to a cleaner future. In fact, exporting more of it, Granholm wrote, would serve mostly to generate “wealth for the owners of export facilities.”
The report itself does nothing to block plans by Trump to lift the pause on LNG-export terminals on his “very first day back.” Proponents of these terminals say they are an economic boon to the places where they are built, and create jobs in regions that need them. (Most of these jobs are connected to constructing the terminals, and are temporary.) The American Gas Association condemned the DOE report as a means to justify the “mistake” of Biden’s LNG pause; the financial research firm S&P Global put out a report the same day that found that LNG exports contribute $400 billion to American GDP, and that the pause and other regulatory measures jeopardize an additional $250 billion in incremental GDP.
With Republicans about to control all three branches of government, though, he wouldn’t predict how the coming fight against new export infrastructure would go. Still, to justify issuing future permits, the Department of Energy must determine that each new export operation is in the public interest. And now the Department of Energy has made a case for why it isn’t.
More at https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/gas-lng-climate-tr
ump/681041/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The tourism video Arctic Wildlife in Greenland
Visit Greenland
that giant Ice Cube Glacier called Greenland a historical part of an expanding Danish Empire a Viking Dane Empire mostly gone today, some of the ice is now less than 10m 33ft thick, with radar and satellite mapping the ice is thought to sit on top of a giant island bedrock, recently scientists discovered Greenland's Grand Canyon or the possibility that Greenland might actually be three islands almost joined together with a big slab of glacier ice on top, the glaciers are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago.
France tells Trump to keep his hands off Greenland: EU will defend its 'sovereign borders'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14262207/France-Trump-EU-atta
ck-sovereign-borders-President-invading-Greenland.html
EU will not tolerate a Trump takeover of Greenland, says France
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/01/08/eu-will-not-tolerate
-trump-takeover-of-greenland-france/
the scientists say it once had Dinosaurs Issi "cold" in Greenlandica plateosaurid dinosaur described in 2021 from the Late Triassic Fleming Fjord Formation of Greenland, is that 210 million years ago?
it contains one species, Issi saaneq; the full binomial name means "cold bone"
times when the Lands were in different places and Earth was warmer
but then Dinosaurs have even been found in the South Pole in Antarctica digs
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Climate change is very close to its 1.5°C flashing red light level
By Kevin Drum | January 10, 2025 – 11:56 am
https://jabberwocking.com/climate-change-is-very-close-to-its-1-5c-fla
shing-red-light-level/
The New York Times reports today that the world has officially warmed by more than 1.5°C. This is based on the Copernicus ERA5 estimate for 2024, which I'm unable to confirm because the Copernicus folks won't let me download their annual data unless I register with a 12-character password—which I did—and then respond to an email confirmation—which they refused to send. https://climate.copernicus.eu/climate-indicators/temperature
However, I can show you the more conventional NASA data:
According to NASA, we're at 1.28°C above the pre-industrial baseline and it will still be a few years before we hit 1.5°C.
How many years? That depends. If you extrapolate from long-term trends it looks like 2037 or so (and around 2050 to hit 2°C). But temps have been skyrocketing recently, and if you extrapolate from that we're only a few years away.
So it's anywhere between now and soon, depending on whose data turns out to be most accurate. Happy New Year.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Earth records hottest year on record in 2024 and breached the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold
Last year’s global average temperature easily passed 2023’s record heat and kept pushing even higher.
It surpassed the long-term warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit ) since the late 1800s that was called for by the 2015 Paris climate pact, according to the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate Service, the United Kingdom’s Meteorology Office and Japan’s weather agency.
The European team calculated 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.89 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming. Japan found 1.57 degrees Celsius (2.83 degrees Fahrenheit) and the British 1.53 degrees Celsius (2.75 degrees Fahrenheit) in releases of data coordinated to early Friday morning European time.
American monitoring teams — NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the private Berkeley Earth — were to release their figures later Friday but all will likely show record heat for 2024, European scientists said.
The six groups compensate for data gaps in observations that go back to 1850 — in different ways, which is why numbers vary slightly.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/climate-change/earth-records-hottest
-year-on-record-in-2024-and-the-jump-was-so-big-it-breached-a-key-threshold/ar-BB1rdGMf
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Warm Dry Weather, drained Lakes nobody collecting River Water running off mountains and hills
then mix in some Political Corruption
and sicko Arsonists are added to the mix
This is Malibu - one of the wealthiest affluent places on the entire planet, now it’s being burnt to ashes.
https://x.com/its_The_Dr/status/1876975165889814616
quote Elon Musk
DEI means people will DIE
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1878289952657560030#m
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U.S. Natural Gas Power Plants to Flourish Alongside the AI Boom
By Tsvetana Paraskova - Jan 13, 2025, 5:00 AM CST
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/US-Natural-Gas-Powe
r-Plants-to-Flourish-Alongside-the-AI-Boom.html
U.S. natural gas is set to be a big winner in the AI boom with several dozen new gas-fired power plants expected to be built in America by the end of the decade, according to analysts.
A total of 80 new gas power plants could be constructed by 2030, adding about 46 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity, per estimates from energy data provider Enverus cited by the Financial Times. This would be 20% higher than the gas capacity additions in the past five years.
Yet, five years ago expectations were that America’s power consumption may have already peaked and would only flatline going forward.
AI and the data centers have upended these forecasts and now U.S. power demand is expected to rise each year in the coming years.
The surge in U.S. power demand due to the AI advancements and data center construction is set to unleash a new boom in the build-out of natural gas power plants to provide reliable 24/7 electricity.
Big Oil is already proposing to help power the AI revolution and the enormous energy consumption with gas power plants. Chevron and Exxon are talking to power generators, energy providers, and data centers to provide what they describe as lower-carbon energy.
The incoming Trump Administration is expected to favor strongly natural gas to power America’s growing electricity demand and scrap some Biden-era environmental constraints on new natural gas generation.
Natural gas-fired power generation in the United States soared to a record high last year, driving up global gas demand.
In recent years, power demand in the United States, the single largest portion of which is delivered by gas-fired power plants, has surged and is expected to continue to soar with rising electrification and more electricity necessary to power and cool data centers.
U.S. power-generating companies are announcing plans for the highest volume of new natural gas-fired capacity in years as the AI boom is driving demand for electricity.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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