human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
VIEWED: 60750
PAGE 92 of 111
Hurricane Helene isn’t an outlier. It’s a harbinger of the future.
By John Morales | September 30, 2024
https://thebulletin.org/2024/09/hurricane-helene-isnt-an-outlier-its-a
-harbinger-of-the-future/
Something’s shifted. And it’s not just the climate.
Even before being named a tropical storm, I knew that what would become Mean Helene was set on a mission to be yet another multibillion-dollar disaster. I knew that it would undergo rapid intensification and become a catastrophic hurricane. And I knew that a calamitous rainfall event would unfold in the Southeast many hours after landfall.
So, I did what I’ve done during my entire 40 year career—I tried to warn people. Except that the warning was not well received by everyone. A person accused me of being a “climate militant,” a suggestion that I’m embellishing extreme weather threats to drive an agenda. Another simply said that my predictions were “an exaggeration.”
But it wasn’t an exaggeration.
More at https://thebulletin.org/2024/09/hurricane-helene-isnt-an-outlier-its-a
-harbinger-of-the-future/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Signym, you are out of touch with reality. A "caring" Trump or a "caring" JD Vance will be too late to correct their mistake.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Better to have a President who cares about America, no matter how mistakenly, than a President who would sell us down river.
We can always correct mistakes. It's much harder to fix deliberate corruption.
When the Arctic Melts
By Elizabeth Kolbert | Oct 7, 2024
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/when-the-arctic-melts
The story of climate change is generally told in terms of human action, and for good reason. The almost two trillion tons of CO2 that people have pumped into the atmosphere have changed the planet in ways that every day become more apparent. Last year, average global temperatures set a new record, and by a wide margin. Canada experienced record wildfires; the Caribbean saw record ocean temperatures, which devastated its coral reefs; and Libya was hit with record rainfall, which led to a dam collapse that killed more than five thousand people. This year’s global temperatures will almost certainly surpass last year’s. Among the many climate-related disasters of 2024 so far have been a heat wave in Mecca that killed thirteen hundred pilgrims during the hajj and Hurricane Helene, which caused at least twenty billion dollars’ worth of damage. How people—or governments and corporations, run by people—respond to the mounting losses will have repercussions that will last, for all intents and purposes, forever. As no less an authority than the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put it, upon releasing its latest scientific assessment, “The future is in our hands.”
But, like so many stories that get told, this one doesn’t tell the whole story. The future depends on how humanity reacts to global warming, and it also depends on how the Earth does. Owing to advances in everything from satellite altimetry to deep-sea drilling, a great deal has been learned in the past few decades about the planet’s history. Much of the new science suggests that the climate is, all on its own, unstable, prone to dramatic and sometimes sudden shifts.
The history of Greenland is a case in point. During what’s known as the Last Glacial Maximum, some twenty thousand years ago, an ice sheet stretched more or less continuously from Greenland across Ellesmere and Baffin Islands and down over Canada and much of the northern United States. So much water was tied up in the ice that sea levels were four hundred feet lower than they are today, and it was possible to walk not just from Siberia to Alaska but also from Australia to Tasmania and from England to France. When the ice began to recede, around fifteen thousand years ago, large swaths of the world experienced catastrophic flooding. During one particularly sodden period, known as meltwater pulse 1A, sea levels rose by more than a foot a decade.
Most scientists believe that ice ages—there have been at least ten of them over the past two and half million years—are initiated and terminated by periodic shifts in the Earth’s orbit, caused by, among other factors, the tug of Jupiter and Saturn. But orbital shifts produce only slight changes in the amount of sunlight that reaches different parts of the globe at different times of the year. Such slight variations are insufficient to explain the growth and subsequent retreat of massive ice sheets. Rather, it seems, the orbital shifts act like a trigger, setting off other processes—feedbacks—that greatly amplify their effect. One relatively straightforward feedback features albedo, from the Latin word for “whiteness.” Ice and especially snow have a high albedo. They reflect lots of sunlight back to space. Thus, as an ice sheet grows, the planet absorbs less energy. This has a cooling effect, which encourages the buildup of more snow and ice, which results in more reflectivity, and so on. Start to melt an ice sheet and the same cycle spins in reverse.
Today, feedbacks are, to put it mildly, a growing
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
A top energy strategist is optimistic about climate change. And he has the data to back that up.
The Associated Press | October 7, 2024, 6:00 AM
Q: You said there were 24 key technologies. What are the top five?
A: So let’s say that it’s 38 gigatons of (CO2) emissions that you need to mitigate. Solar photovoltaic alone will mitigate 11 gigatons. Batteries and EVs separately are the next important, which is about 5.5 gigatons each. And CCUS (carbon capture, utilization and storage) also has the potential to mitigate 5.5 gigatons. The fifth is wind, which is also like 5.5 gigatons. (11+5.5+5.5+5.5+5.5 = 33 gigatons)
Q: What’s the one technology no one has heard about yet?
A: For instance, high temperature energy storage. One is called “the sun in the box,” this big block of graphite, or black carbon, and you can heat the block to 2,000 degrees, and you do that when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining.
You can have solar panels inside producing electricity from the wavelength radiation from the block, and you have pipes into it with super hot high pressure water, so you can choose whether you want to take out the energy as electricity or as hot over-pressurized water, for instance for metal production... Just one example of a new long duration storage technology.
Q: Are you an optimist or a pessimist about holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century?
A: Some people call me climate optimistic but I’m quite fact-based on this. It is possible, for CO2 alone, to limit emissions to 650 gigatons, which corresponds to 1.6 degrees warming, and if you do something with methane on top of that, 1.5 degrees is still within reach.
The iPhone disrupted the media, and solar and batteries will be such a disruptive technology, because they’re cheaper and better. People underestimate how fast it will go. In 1945 it was all steam locomotives and by 1960 they were all diesel electric, only 15 years to change a gigantic system, because the new technology was cheaper and better.
https://wtop.com/news/2024/10/a-top-energy-strategist-is-optimistic-ab
out-climate-change-and-he-has-the-data-to-back-that-up/
https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=8a5b78c2-86cf-44e3-a16e-cd3d216f3412&share=true
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Well that's just it.
Until you actually make it cheaper and better don't expect one ounce of your research to ever amount to anything.
Don't waste time taking interviews for idiots to read. Get your ass back to work and figure it out.
--------------------------------------------------
Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President. 
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
World on track for catastrophic 3 degrees Celsius warming, UN warns
October 24, 2024 4:01 pm CET
https://www.politico.eu/article/united-nations-emissions-gap-global-wa
rming-data-climate-change-report/
The world is already 1.3C hotter than before the Industrial Revolution, and planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to rise, increasing by 1.3 percent last year compared with 2022.
As a result, limiting warming to the relative safety of the Paris targets has become more difficult, requiring even steeper annual emissions cuts of 7.5 percent or 4 percent by 2030 for 1.5C or 2C, respectively.
With the policies currently in place across the globe, the world is heading for 3.1C of warming by the end of the century, the report says. Measures outlined in current NDCs, which haven’t been fully implemented, would bring that down to between 2.6C and 2.8C.
Even the best-case scenario of 2.6C, however, represents “catastrophic” warming with “debilitating impacts to people, planet and economies,” the U.N. warns.
Progress among the G20 is a mixed bag: China’s emissions grew 5.2 percent in 2023, while the EU’s fell 7.5 percent; and while China is much more populous, its per-capita emissions in 2023 were 11 tons to the EU’s 7.3 tons.
U.S. emissions fell by 1.4 percent, but American per-capita emissions remain the second-highest at 18 tons after Russia’s 19 tons.
Full report is here: https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2024
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Capturing Carbon From the Air Just Got Easier
By University of California - Berkeley | October 25, 2024
UC Berkeley graduate student Zihui Zhou, the paper’s first author, said that a mere 200 grams of the material, a bit less than half a pound, can take up as much CO2 in a year — 20 kilograms (44 pounds) — as a tree.
“Flue gas capture is a way to slow down climate change because you are trying not to release CO2 to the air. Direct air capture is a method to take us back to like it was 100 or more years ago,” Zhou said. “Currently, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is more than 420 ppm, but that will increase to maybe 500 or 550 before we fully develop and employ flue gas capture. So if we want to decrease the concentration and go back to maybe 400 or 300 ppm, we have to use direct air capture.”
https://scitechdaily.com/berkeleys-magic-material-capturing-carbon-fro
m-the-air-just-got-easier/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Capturing Carbon From the Air Just Got Easier
By University of California - Berkeley | October 25, 2024
UC Berkeley graduate student Zihui Zhou, the paper’s first author, said that a mere 200 grams of the material, a bit less than half a pound, can take up as much CO2 in a year — 20 kilograms (44 pounds) — as a tree.
“Flue gas capture is a way to slow down climate change because you are trying not to release CO2 to the air. Direct air capture is a method to take us back to like it was 100 or more years ago,” Zhou said. “Currently, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is more than 420 ppm, but that will increase to maybe 500 or 550 before we fully develop and employ flue gas capture. So if we want to decrease the concentration and go back to maybe 400 or 300 ppm, we have to use direct air capture.”
https://scitechdaily.com/berkeleys-magic-material-capturing-carbon-fro
m-the-air-just-got-easier/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I'm looking forward to Thunderf00t debunking these claims, like he always does. Maybe it will get him to focus on something other than Elon Musk. That dude obsesses over Elon more than Second and Ted obsess over Trump.
The media really needs to stop reporting on magic that breaks the laws of thermodynamics until it's tested and proven to be viable.
Anybody remember the Theranos debacle?
Or our very own "Solar Freakin' Roadways"?
"Waterseer"? The "Hyper Loop"? How about a nanotube skyscraper/elevator held up by a satellite that would allow us to get spaceships out of the atmosphere without
burning 2 Million times per second what you use while driving your car?
I'm glad that we're trying to figure things like these out. I wish the reporting on them was a LOT better than it is though. Everybody is so busy chasing waterfalls that they forget to actually fact check claims that are almost always proven to be unfounded in hindsight.
That's a very expensive lesson that the international auto-industry found out the hard way when they realized nobody wants their shitty 1st generation electric cars, and the low number of early adopters they did con into it will evaporate once they realize that there is no used car market for them and your car is headed to the junkyard for $500 when the battery dies.
--------------------------------------------------
Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
World on pace for significantly more warming without immediate climate action, report warns
https://www.newsday.com/news/nation/climate-change-chaos-warming-15-po
llution-carbon-k56947
Carl Sagan calmly told Congress what would happen to our climate
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Greenhouse gases surged to new highs in 2023, warns UN weather agency
28 October 2024 | Climate and Environment
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/10/1156186
New data released by the UN on Monday indicating that greenhouse gases have hit a record high shows once again that urgent action and not words is needed from the world’s major polluters to protect us all from climate change, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) insisted.
The WMO report pointed out that from 1990 to 2023, radiative forcing – the warming effect on our climate from greenhouse gases increased by 51.5 per cent. CO2 accounted for more than 80 per cent of this increase, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Annual Greenhouse Gas Index.
Toxic relationship
“As long as emissions continue, greenhouse gases will continue accumulating in the atmosphere leading to global temperature rise,” the UN agency said. “Given the extremely long life of CO2 in the atmosphere, the temperature level already observed will persist for several decades even if emissions are rapidly reduced to net zero.”
Asked about whether the UN climate conference might be expected to yield tangible commitments from countries, the WMO Deputy Secretary-General noted that politicians worldwide do reference the latest scientific climate findings and forecasts in their public declarations. “So I do think they are listening, the question is to what degree will we see that manifest at COP29 in action,” she said.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Two major laws passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden provide new money and new requirements for reducing potent methane emissions, including those coming from abandoned oil and gas wells. Now the federal government has started awarding some contracts for capping those wells. But the election could impact whether this work will continue, since former President Donald Trump wants to reverse many rules and recently referred to climate concerns as a scam.
MILES O'BRIEN: Methane traps about 80 times more heat during a 20-year lifetime than carbon dioxide. It is responsible for about 30 percent of human-caused global warming, and about 8 percent of methane emissions in Pennsylvania are linked to orphaned and abandoned wells.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME