tingilinde

coherence

The current period is more significant than the little ice age. 

snip

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What makes those older eras different from modern warming is coherence—that climate change is happening today just about everywhere at the same time. “That coherence cannot be explained by the natural variability of the climate system,” Steiger said. And it does not characterize any previous era.

“This study is another nail in the coffin of the idea of that there was a globally warm or cold period that fit tidily into a specific couple of centuries,” said Yarrow Axford, a climate scientist at Northwestern University, in an email. She was not involved in writing the new paper. The idea that the Little Ice Age or eras like it were uniform global events was “already dying within the scientific community,” she said, yet that idea remains “perennially popular with nonexperts who want to sow doubt about the significance of the dramatic and truly global warming that has occurred in the past century.”

...

 

preserving sound

Nature preserves that try to keep the sounds of humanity out.

 

 

the evil side of the wildlife service

Doing favors for rancher and farmers that don't make much sense in the grand scheme of things.. 

snip

...

“We were like, ‘Holy shit,’” says Manu. He hit the gas and screeched up winding mountain roads outside of town. “I thought maybe [the victim] was missing a leg or something. That is what it sounded like.”

At the home of Dr Mansfield and his family, he found a frightening scene. On the driveway, just outside the sprawling timbered house, the family’s dog, Kasey, was dead. Inside the home, Canyon Mansfield, 14 years old, the youngest of three children, was sobbing. His head was pounding and his eyes were burning – he needed to go to the emergency room.

Manu soon pieced together the story. While playing in the woods behind the family home, Canyon and his dog had stumbled upon a strange device that sprayed them in the face with a dose of of sodium cyanide. The boy managed to quickly clean the poison out of his eyes, but the dog collapsed and started convulsing. As Kasey lay dying on the hillside, Dr Mansfield had wanted to give Kasey CPR, but Canyon told him that if he did, he’d ingest the deadly stuff himself.

It didn’t take detective Manu and his team of investigators long to uncover how it got there. The so-called cyanide bomb was not the work of some rogue actor or terrorist cell. It had been installed by a federal employee on official business.

“The United States government put a cyanide bomb 350ft from my house, and killed my dog and poisoned my child,” said Theresa Mansfield, Canyon’s mother.

...

a tip of the hat to Bjarne

 

on dieselgate

How VW (and other German car makers) got there and how it may have saved VW.

 

sharpiegate

everything he touches...

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The report, whose findings were accepted by NOAA’s leadership and released Monday, found Neil Jacobs, the acting administrator, and former NOAA deputy chief of staff and communications director Julie Kay Roberts guilty of twice violating codes of the agency’s scientific integrity policy.

“It will be clear to anyone reviewing the accounts captured in this highly credible, independent Scientific Integrity report that the political leaders who interfered in our emergency response system need to publicly apologize or resign,” said Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.). Tonko had made an integrity complaint, and is the sponsor of a bill that would make such violations more accountable across federal science agencies.

NOAA’s scientific integrity policy prohibits political interference with the conduct and communication of the agency’s scientific findings.

...

Of course this all works to fulfill the Republican goal of destroying government institutions other than the military. Cripple them, hollow them out, and let them collapse.

 

 

 

90% renewables in the us by 2035?

A group at Berkely looks at a couple of scenarios..  remarkable things are possible, but would require policy changes. 

snip

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“Technically, it’s feasible,” says Billy Pizer, an expert in climate change who teaches at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and was not involved in the Berkeley research. “I think people have thought about this for awhile and, with a combination of renewables and storage, you can certainly reach those sorts of targets.”

Researchers took the available data on renewable energy and created two scenarios for the next 15 years. In one, energy policy remains the way it is now, without ambitious policy changes to encourage the growth of renewable energy. The other imagines what ambitious policy changes implemented over that time could yield. In the first forecast, 55 percent of U.S. energy infrastructure would come from renewables. That falls short of the change necessary to meet the Paris Climate Agreement goals, but does reflect the dramatically lowering costs in the renewable energy sector. “Cost reductions in clean technology have occurred much faster than anticipated just a few years ago,” said Amol Phadke, a senior scientist at UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Public Policy in a press release. “It is technically and economically feasible to deliver 90 percent carbon-free electricity on the U.S. power grid by 2035.”

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song and story swap from the earthwatch institute

Environmental journalist Andy Revkin runs a Sunday morning webcast for the Earthwatch Institute (where he's a prof now).  It's posted to at Earth Institute Live where they do outreach.  Andy is an amateur folksinger and longtime friend of Pete Seeger. 

can planting a million trees reverse global warming?

no - and it's complicated.

 

indoor pollution

As Greg recently pointed out, gas stoves can severely degrade air quality indoors.  And there are other sources of pollution, but regulation?

 

 

how smog can form out of the blue

Given the right pollutants and conditions.