1661

Yeah, it’s not the huge blizzards or the light sprinklings, but rather the consistent (and thick) snow that seems to be getting rarer as time goes on.

1662

I dunno, it looks like the annual snowfall is pretty standard, at least in Pennsylvania. Last year was a beast, and I didn’t see my lawn for months.

1663

'Climate concern ‘linked to floods’:

Public belief in the reality of climate change has risen in Britain, partly because of the 2013 winter floods, according to a report.

Concern has almost returned to the high levels reported in 2005, say University of Cardiff researchers. Britons named climate change as a major issue facing the UK alongside crime and education in a national survey. Many see climate change as contributing at least in part to floods, especially when they have been affected directly.

However, while there is evidence that extreme weather events are becoming more common, scientists say it is not possible to attribute individual weather events to climate change.

The storms that began in October 2013 forced many from their homes and made the 2013-14 winter the wettest on record. More than 5,000 homes and businesses were flooded and many rivers in southern England reached their highest ever recorded levels.

It’s sort a bit too late once your house is under water, and many of these people get trapped as insurance will not fully cover them (if at all) and they can not move as no one will buy their old ‘flooding’ house. I’ve been recommending for years now that friends and family don’t buy before checking out flood planes status and height above water, you also have to watch for local rivers in valley’s etc. Once the sea level rises kick in, beach front/water front is also one to avoid. That is going to affect lots of places, and lots of people.

1664

I think anything around the Great Lakes is going to see more extreme snow events as climate change marches on. All I know is that the days of availability at the local skiing slopes is indeed fewer, and the amount of fake snow being used is larger. Then again, that could always be the owners of the slopes crafting some reason for raising the rates on lift tickets, lol.

Zak - in the US, flood insurance is a government program. Is that the same in the UK?

1665

Dan - I can actually answer that one, as I have friends who live in a flood zone.

The answer is, kinda. The properties with a “moderate” or higher floor risk will be able get insurance later this year from a non-profit that the flood insurance companies set up, which will have a (quite high) cap on individual insurance payments and the rest of the funding will come from a tax on all home insurance policies in the UK. The government’s “promised” to handle really catastrophic flooding (worse than 1/200 years), but without any actual commitments. Oh, and it’s limited to 20 years, after which there will be no government involvement and there’s no coverage of recently built or commercial property.

As ever, it’s the coalition government’s worst sort of mix of socialising costs and corporate capitalism.

1666

In some cases, like Starlight mentions, yes, but in many no, you are pretty much at the mercy of the insurance companies and many people are left without cover. As usual the government was very slow to respond, and as mentioned the program in place is pretty complex (to put people off trying i suspect) and won’t cover everyone. Luck of the draw.

‘Shell urges shareholders to accept climate resolution’:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/29/shell-urges-shareholders-to-accept-climate-change-resolution

Shell is set to confront the risk that climate change may pose to its future, after backing a resolution from activist shareholders. The move came on the same day it announced $15bn (£10bn) in cost cutting due to plummeting oil prices and said it wanted to resume drilling for oil in the Arctic.

The resolution, filed by 150 investors who control hundreds of billions of pounds, requires the oil major to test whether its business model is compatible with the pledge by the world’s nations to limit global warming to 2C.

The 2C target means only a quarter of existing, exploitable fossil fuel reserves are burnable, according to a series of recent analyses. That implies trillions of dollars of oil, gas and coal held by investors could become worthless and that continuing exploration for fossil fuels may be pointless.

The resolution, also filed with BP, includes a ban on corporate bonuses for climate-harming activities and a commitment to invest in renewable energy.

“This is a turning point and demonstrates the power of activist strategies to deal with climate change,” said Catherine Howarth, chief executive of ShareAction, which helped coordinate the resolutions.

“We maintain our commitment to engage with shareholders in this area,” said Shell’s executive vice president JJ Traynor, in a letter to shareholders, in which he asked them to back the resolution. “We look forward to implementing the resolution should it be passed at the AGM.” The proposal will need the support of 75% of shareholders to pass in May.

“This is a huge victory for the climate, which demonstrates the power of positive shareholder engagement,” said Elspeth Owens, at environmental legal group ClientEarth, which also helped coordinate the resolutions. “The vast majority of Shell shareholders are now likely to vote in support. This throws down the gauntlet for BP to face up to its climate risk.”

Some investors concerned about global warming have chosen to sell off their fossil fuels stocks in a fast-growing campaign of divestment that seeks to stigmatise the companies. They argue that current business models are unsupportable given that over $700bn a year is spent exploring for new oil, gas and coal, despite three-quarters of existing reserves being unburnable if climate change is tackled.

1667

A new NYT poll on US attitudes towards global warming was just released. There are some encouraging signs, including this one:

Although the poll found that climate change was not a top issue in determining a person’s vote, a candidate’s position on climate change influences how a person will vote. For example, 67 percent of respondents, including 48 percent of Republicans and 72 percent of independents, said they were less likely to vote for a candidate who said that human-caused climate change is a hoax.

That’s encouraging. A moderate candidate who is a climate-change believer would thus fare well in the general election. However, there are some significant hurdles for a GOP candidate to win the primaries unless they at lease hem and haw on the issue:

But among those who support the Tea Party, 49 percent said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who said “I’m not a scientist” or a variant.

1668

To balance that out a bit there is this:

‘Many Americans reject evolution, deny climate change and find GM food unsafe, survey finds’:

The report by the Pew Research Center in Washington DC was conducted with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and sought to compare the opinions of a cross-section of the US public with those held by the AAAS’s scientific members.

Published in the journal Science, the survey found that 31% of the US public believed that humans had existed in their present form since the beginning, with a further 24% stating that humans had evolved under the guiding hand of a supreme being. In contrast, only 2% of AAAS scientists said humans had not evolved in their time on Earth.

The proportion of the public who believed evolution had happened through natural processes, as described by Charles Darwin more than 150 years ago, was only slightly greater than a third at 35%. The survey drew on phone interviews with 2,002 US adults chosen to be representative of the nation, and online questions of 3,748 US-based members of the AAAS.

The US has embraced genetically modifed crops, with 69m hectares (170.4m acres) given over to their cultivation, but the survey suggests the technology is still regarded as contentious by a significant portion of US society. A striking 57% of the public surveyed by Pew believed that GM foods were unsafe to eat. The overwhelming view of the scientists, was that the food was safe, with 88% having no concerns about eating GM.

Perhaps the most contentious issue the survey touched on was climate change, where only half of the population agreed with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change view that climate change was mostly driven by human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels. Nearly half said there was either no good evidence for global warming, or that the recent warming of the Earth was due to natural climate variability.

Scientists and the broader public disagreed most strongly about the safety of GM foods, though their views differed substantially on global warming too, with 87% of scientists believing that climate change was mostly caused by human activity.

The main article is on the New Look Guardian website in it’s ‘science’ section which is accessible by scrolling down to the bottom of the long page! It’s on the left of the page.

1669

Some good(ish) news for the UK’s future environment, Fracking set to be banned in 40% of the current sites that were earmarked for it:
<br />
<br />

Fracking is set to be banned on two-fifths of the land in England being offered for shale gas exploration by the government, according to a Guardian analysis.

Such a wide-ranging ban would be a significant blow to the UK’s embryonic fracking industry, which David Cameron and George Osborne have enthusiastically backed.

There were setbacks last week after the Scottish government declared a moratorium and UK ministers were forced to accept a swath of new environmental protections proposed by Labour, leading some analysts to say the outlook for fracking was bleak

One of those new protections was to rule out fracking in national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty (AONBs), sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) and groundwater source protection zones (SPZs).

Neither the government nor Labour have stated how much of the land available for future shale gas drilling – 60% of England - would be affected by the new bans. But a Guardian data analysis has revealed it is 39.7%, with large swaths of the south and south east off-limits, as well as the Yorkshire Dales and Peak district.

An independent analysis by Greenpeace also found that 45% of the 931 blocks being licensed for fracking in England were at least 50% covered by protected areas, which it said was likely to make them unattractive to fracking companies. Just 3% of of the blocks have no protected areas at all, Greenpeace found.

Ministers were forced to accept Labour’s new environmental rules last week to avoid a rebellion by Conservative and LibDem backbench MPs, many of whom are facing opposition to fracking from constituents. Labour’s shadow energy minister Tom Greatrex told MPs: “Let me make it absolutely clear that our new clause is all or nothing; it cannot be cherry-picked. All the conditions need to be in place before we can be absolutely confident that any shale extraction can happen.”

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/02/fracking-set-to-be-banned-from-40-of-englands-shale-areas

1670

Got my Tdap booster this morning. Figured the best way to be pro-vaccines is to get them. Called my mom to see if I ever had measles, which was a no, but I did have chicken pox as a kid. So MMR is probably next.

1671

'Ancient climate records ‘back predictions’:

Records of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere millions of years ago support current predictions on climate change, say scientists.

Evidence from the last warm period in the Earth’s ancient past suggests the climate will respond as expected to rising CO2 levels.

The research, published in Nature, is in line with future predictions from the IPCC, says the UK-led team.

The evidence came from ancient plankton fossils drilled from the ocean floor.

These creatures’ shells contain clues as to how the global climate cycled from cool to warm many times some 2.3 to 3.3 million years ago, across what researchers refer to as the Pliocene and Pleistocene Epochs in Earth history.

Scientists from the UK and Australia used this ancient climate record to reconstruct the CO2 content of the planet’s atmosphere, comparing it to a separate record of CO2 acquired from bubbles of ancient atmosphere trapped in ice drilled from the poles.

“We have shown that the change in Earth’s temperature for a given change in CO2, once the effect of the growth and retreat of the highly reflective continental ice sheets was taken into account, was not only identical during both the cold Pleistocene and warm Pliocene periods, but was also similar to the understanding recently summarised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),” said co-researcher Dr Gavin Foster of the University of Southampton.

“This implies that as we approach a Pliocene-like future, the IPCC range of climate sensitivity is likely to be suitable for describing the degree of warming we should expect.”

1672

A video and webpage about a ‘fossil free’ movement:

http://gofossilfree.org/

1673

This is sad: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/02/09/the-monarch-massacre-nearly-a-billion-butterflies-have-vanished/

Yet: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarming/11395516/The-fiddling-with-temperature-data-is-the-biggest-science-scandal-ever.html

1674

Christopher Booker is kind of a crank though.

I’d be interested in knowing what the actual explanation for the data alterations is though. I suspect that it actually has been explained pretty well.

1675

Pretty much

1676

Wow, that explanation is more disconcerting than anything the telegraph writes. “we didn’t alter the data, we “processed” it…”

1677

Well, then steer away from science if knowing the details of it is so worrying for you.

1678

‘Scientists urge global ‘wake-up call’ to deal with climate change’: (sorry, more science i’m afraid)

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/10/geoengineering-should-not-be-used-as-a-climate-fix-yet-says-us-science-academy

Climate change has advanced so rapidly that the time has come to look at options for a planetary-scale intervention, the National Academy of Science said on Tuesday.

The scientists were categorical that geoengineering should not be deployed now, and was too risky to ever be considered an alternative to cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

But it was better to start research on such unproven technologies now – to learn more about their risks – than to be stampeded into climate-shifting experiments in an emergency, the scientists said.

With that, a once-fringe topic in climate science moved towards the mainstream – despite the repeated warnings from the committee that cutting carbon pollution remained the best hope for dealing with climate change.

“That scientists are even considering technological interventions should be a wake-up call that we need to do more now to reduce emissions, which is the most effective, least risky way to combat climate change,” Marcia McNutt, the committee chair and former director of the US Geological Survey, said.

Asked whether she foresaw a time when scientists would eventually turn to some of the proposals studied by the committee, she said: “Gosh, I hope not.”

The two-volume report, produced over 18 months by a team of 16 scientists, was far more guarded than a similar British exercise five years ago which called for an immediate injection of funds to begin research on climate-altering interventions.

The scientists were so sceptical about geo-engineering that they dispensed with the term, opting for “climate intervention”. Engineering implied a measure of control the technologies do not have, the scientists said.

But the twin US reports – Climate Intervention: Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration and Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool the Earth – could boost research efforts at a limited scale.

The White House and committee leaders in Congress were briefed on the report’s findings this week.

Bill Gates, among others, argues the technology, which is still confined to computer models, has enormous potential and he has funded research at Harvard. The report said scientific research agencies should begin carrying out co-ordinated research.

But geo-engineering remains extremely risky and relying on a planetary hack – instead of cutting carbon dioxide emissions – is “irresponsible and irrational”, the report said.

Pretty certain ‘prevention better than cure’ should be the MO here. Once we’ve screwed it up, it’s going to stay screwed for a good long while (and see you in the New Stone Age (which i’m kinda looking forward too)).

1679

Processing data is what scientists do for a living. Science is processed data.

There’s almost a problem that the general perception of scientists is too positive. When people hear how actual day to day science is done, they’re appalled. Ugh, it’s so subjective! There are humans involved…and they’re making decisions based on experience intuition instead of clear cold logic! Oh my!

1680

That article is actually less good than the article it references.

This article describes things very well, and I don’t believe that anyone who reads it will really think that there’s some nefarious plot to hide the truth.