Climate deniers have lost all credibility!
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/opinion/04krugman.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

I am featured on the Climate Project Website.
http://us.theclimateproject.org/

EV Charging Network Coming to PA       On March 11, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection announced a partnership with 350Green, a developer of electric vehicle (EV) charging station networks, to design, build, and operate a network of 22 EV fast charging and 44 Level 2 charging stations across the state. A substantial portion of the chargers will be concentrated in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh regions. Construction is scheduled to begin in the second half of 2011 and be complete by mid-2012.    If PA DEP projections of EV purchases are correct, 350Green estimates that by 2020 its Pennsylvania charging network can help displace 260 million gallons of fuel, which represents $580 million in avoided costs and 1.6 million cumulative tons of CO2 emissions avoided per year.

The denier lies about Al Gore get exposed again:

http://climateprogress.org/2011/03/28/koch-richard-muller-gore-cicerone-polar-bears-friedman/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogress%2FlCrX+%28Climate+Progress%29

 

NASA's latest climate report below shows "a global increase in extremely hot summers. From 1951 - 1980 extremely hot summers increased from 2 - 3 % to as much as 30 - 40 % to 2010. It also show that while it was unusually cold this winter in the eastern United States and northern Eurasia, Hudson Bay and Baffin Bay (between Canada and Greenland) were essentially ice-free, the first recorded time that ice-free conditions lasted so long."

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110327_Perceptions.pdf

The liar deniers got caught red handed spreading lies about Al Gore:
http://climateprogress.org/2011/03/28/koch-richard-muller-gore-cicerone-polar-bears-friedman/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogress%2FlCrX+%28Climate+Progress%29

http://www.newsworks.org/index.php?option=com_flexicontent&view=items&id=14863:09pcflower

Quakers run a muck!

Just 5 days after the disastrous Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, 250,000 people congregated on the Mall in Washington DC for the 40^th Anniversary Earth Day celebration.

While oil and gas surged from the broken pipe in the Gulf destroying marine ecosystems, killing dolphins, turtles, birds and other creatures and oozed destructively toward shore, I watched a sea of 250,000 people gather in front of the Earth Day stage.  I waited in expectation for protests against off shore drilling to begin, especially when White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) Secretary, Nancy Sutley took the stage.

 Talk about a colossal missed opportunity for the environmental community to send an important “no off shore drilling” message to national media and the government! No uprisings from the Sierra Club, Earthjustice or even Greenpeace, or from the quarter million attendees. The silence was deafening. What has become of the environmental movement? 

Cyber activism, in my view, along with discouragement over the lack of fair balanced media coverage, and the industry supported money-flush anti-environmental organizations, are destroying the spirit of the environmental movement.

 All national environmental organizations now rely on websites and email blasts to rally activists. Sure it’s cheaper and saves trees by reducing paper use, but to me websites are like retail stores; they are totally dependent on walk-in business. Email blasts are “outbound” or “outreach” efforts, but many people ignore them because the message always asks for money and therefore smacks of a fundraising ploy. Plus you usually get upwards of 15 requests from different organizations asking you to contact your legislator about the same issue.  After a while you can’t remember to what you responded or from which group. It’s ridiculous.

Out of curiosity, I asked a few legislators’ Aids what it’s like on the receiving end when email blasts come in. Several responded, “We can tell when a special interest blast comes in and we acknowledge it, but we also know that it comes from a national environmental organization and not our constituents. It doesn’t count nearly as much as when constituents show up in our office or write us a personal letter.”

The most damaging part of cyber activism to the “movement”, in my opinion, is when activists respond to e-alerts they think their job is done; their conscious is clear; they did their part and therefore there’s no more sweat equity required. The email has negligible impact on the legislator, especially when the legislator gets sizable campaign donations from anti-environmental groups. 

The end result, when you need to get a huge Wisconsin rally turnout at a legislator’s in-district office or at a serious environmental disaster site for a protest, very few show up. Or you hold the 40^th Anniversary Earth Day event on the Mall in Washington DC during the worst oil spill in history and out of a quarter of a million spectators no one protests.

 It’s time to slap the Defibrillator on the environmental movement. We need to resuscitate the environmental movement by getting people to stand up and be counted, in person, and to show up in larger numbers as they did in Wisconsin.

The anti-environmentalists have money power; our only power is people power. Mouse pad activism showed no measurable results at COP-15 in getting a world agreement on climate policy nor did it get us an energy bill in America. We’re getting trounced! It’s time to rethink our strategy and get people out from behind their laptops and back in the oppositions face. The environmental movement needs to show the same kind of energy and turnout numbers that happened in Wisconsin and demand the needed changes that will save our planet.  

CO2 has risen some more from burning fossil fuels. Here's the latest report from NOOA:

Recent Mauna Loa CO₂

January 2011:     391.19 ppm 
 PDF Version

The graph shows recent monthly mean carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii.

The last four complete years of the Mauna Loa CO₂ record plus the current year are shown. Data are reported as a dry air mole fraction defined as the number of molecules of carbon dioxide divided by the number of all molecules in air, including CO₂ itself, after water vapor has been removed. The mole fraction is expressed as parts per million (ppm). Example: 0.000400 is expressed as 400 ppm.

In the above figure, the dashed red line with diamond symbols represents the monthly mean values, centered on the middle of each month. The black line with the square symbols represents the same, after correction for the average seasonal cycle. The latter is determined as a moving average of SEVEN adjacent seasonal cycles centered on the month to be corrected, except for the first and last THREE and one-half years of the record, where the seasonal cycle has been averaged over the first and last SEVEN years, respectively.

The last year of data are still preliminary, pending recalibrations of reference gases and other quality control checks. The Mauna Loa data are being obtained at an altitude of 3400 m in the northern subtropics, and may not be the same as the globally averaged CO₂ concentration at the surface.

Full Mauna Loa CO₂ record

 PDF Version

Monthly mean atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii

The carbon dioxide data (red curve), measured as the mole fraction in dry air, on Mauna Loa constitute the longest record of direct measurements of CO₂ in the atmosphere. They were started by C. David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in March of 1958 at a facility of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [Keeling, 1976]. NOAA started its own CO₂measurements in May of 1974, and they have run in parallel with those made by Scripps since then [Thoning, 1989]. The black curve represents the seasonally corrected data.

Data are reported as a dry mole fraction defined as the number of molecules of carbon dioxide divided by the number of molecules of dry air multiplied by one million (ppm).

Annual Mean Growth Rate for Mauna Loa, Hawaii

The table shows annual mean carbon dioxide growth rates for Mauna Loa.

The annual mean rate of growth of CO₂ in a given year is the difference in concentration between the end of December and the start of January of that year. If used as an average for the globe, it would represent the sum of all CO₂ added to, and removed from, the atmosphere during the year by human activities and by natural processes. There is a small amount of month-to-month variability in the CO₂ concentration that may be caused by anomalies of the winds or weather systems arriving at Mauna Loa. This variability would not be representative of the underlying trend for the northern hemisphere which Mauna Loa is intended to represent. Therefore, we finalize our estimate for the annual mean growth rate of the previous year in March, by using the average of the most recent November-February months, corrected for the average seasonal cycle, as the trend value for January 1. Our estimate for the annual mean growth rate (based on the Mauna Loa data) is obtained by subtracting the same four-month average centered on the previous January 1. Preliminary values for the previous year are calculated in January and in February.

The estimated uncertainty in the Mauna Loa annual mean growth rate is 0.11 ppm/yr. This estimate is based on the standard deviation of the differences between monthly mean values measured independently by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and by NOAA/ESRL.

Data

The complete Mauna Loa CO₂ records described on this page are available.

•  Mauna Loa CO₂ monthly mean data
•  Mauna Loa CO₂ annual mean data
•  Mauna Loa CO₂ annual mean growth rates

Additional CO₂ data from Mauna Loa and other worldwide sampling sites can be found using the ESRL/GMD Data Navigator of public data sets.

These values are subject to change depending on quality control checks of the measured data, but any revisions are expected to be small. The estimated annual growth rates for Mauna Loa are close, but not identical, to the global growth rates. The standard deviation of the differences is 0.26 ppm/yr.

• See change log and notes
• A description of how we make measurements at Mauna Loa.

How to reference content from this page 
Dr. Pieter Tans, NOAA/ESRL (www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/)

Contact 

• Pieter Tans, NOAA/ESRL, ph. 303 497 6678, Pieter.Tans@noaa.gov

Further Reading 

• C.D. Keeling, R.B. Bacastow, A.E. Bainbridge, C.A. Ekdahl, P.R. Guenther, and L.S. Waterman, Atmospheric carbon dioxide variations at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, Tellus, vol. 28, 538-551, 1976.
• K.W. Thoning, P.P. Tans, and W.D. Komhyr Atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa Observatory 2. Analysis of the NOAA GMCC data, 1974-1985, J. Geophys. Research, vol. 94, 8549-8565, 1989.

Since America has experienced severe snowstorms this winter, the climate skeptics are out in droves poking fun at how “ Al Gore’s liberals” use every weather event to prove global warming.  I’m not sure how climate change, or global warming, got politicized because its ramifications will impact conservatives and liberals; Republicans and Democrats alike.

It’s easy to tell when a climate denier is really on an ideologically hate rant. They almost always bring up Al Gore’s name or use the word politics a lot in their diatribe. That’s the give-a-way.

Climatologists have known for decades that climate change is happening. Al Gore didn’t invent or make up climate change information. He just compiled it into an effective documentary from many scientific sources.

As the science progresses and gets more sophisticated more is discovered. Weather patterns are regional and the snow storms are just that, weather. The operable word for climate related storms is: extreme. Many parts of America had very extreme weather events. A recent snowstorm was 2,000 miles across. You can see a satellite photo of it at NASA’s website. Ask Australia about extreme weather.  They had the most extreme flooding ever seen in that region. If I had the space here, I could go add a very long list of extreme storms.

The bottom line is, CO2 concentrations have increased by 110 parts per million (PPM) in the last 150 years from burning fossil fuels. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more moisture rises and the more comes down in extreme storms.  When Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth came out CO2 was 385 PPM, it is now 390 PPM and rising by 3 PPM per year. That’s a fact!

Rather than listening to ideological hate rants and following hearsay by people that have no clue what they are talking about, find out the real facts by following reliable scientific websites, get the science from the scientists not misinformed ideologues:

NASA http://www.giss.nasa.gov/
National Snow and Ice Data Center  http://nsidc.org/
NOAA’s National Climate Data Center  http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html

Richard Whiteford

Savebiosphere3@verizon.net

Please read this very informative article about Climate Change from the 12/22/10 NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/science/earth/22carbon.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a2

This is a very interesting conversation between Dr. Jim Hansen and Bill McKibben:

http://www.stormsofmygrandchildren.com/

For the last three million years natural CO2 levels hovered around 280 parts per million (PPM). But since 1750 they abruptly (in geological time) increased to today’s 390 PPM. Life’s stability on the planet now teeters on a CO2 fulcrum precariously tilting toward demise.


Skeptics can shout all the Cassandra epithets they want about this being another doom and gloom message but facts are facts. Twenty years ago, globally, we pumped about 25 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. Today we pump in 37 billion tons; twenty years from now it may be as high as 50 billion tons. This rate of increase could push CO2 levels to a perilous 400 PPM within ten years causing serious food or water shortages in massive continental areas and sea level rise in highly populated coastal areas displacing hundreds of millions of people causing serious conflicts over resources. Does this alarm anyone?

We’ve known for six decades that CO2 levels influence global temperatures and that burning fossil fuels is the major cause of CO2 increase, yet in six decades we’ve chosen to deny it and avoided converting to clean energy. In fact, we’ve exponentially ramped up fossil fuel energy reliance because “it’s cheap” and the fossil fuel industries cooped governments to bend the rules and finances in their favor. The only reason fossil fuels are cheap is because the fossil fuel industry has not been held legally responsible to pay the true cost of the backend environmental and health damages they cause to society.

In the past six decades government leaders kept handing the problem down to the leaders that followed them until the problem now lies squarely in our laps. A problem so dire that we are staring in the face of the Do-or-Die-Decade with no more wiggle room; no more passing it on to the next generation. The game is over if we as a species want to survive.

World leaders tell us that nations have no choice but to depend on coal to meet the demands of future energy needs. Last year, the United States’ use of power generated by wind and solar increased significantly but power generated by coal increased seven times more. The United States, China, India, and Russia posses 60 percent of the world’s coal, and combined, have 40 percent of the world’s population. What a paradox!

Are humans suicidal? Our choice is to continue burning fossil fuels and perish or stop burning fossil fuels immediately, disrupt economies, but hope to survive the impacts of the 390 PPM we already loaded into the atmosphere. Yes energy needs are important but if most of life as we know it perishes won’t energy needs be a moot point?

In this Do-or-Die paradigm let’s hope the negotiators at COP-16 do not live up to the expected failed negotiations because time has run out for the human species, if we fail this time. We need to put a huge tax (yes, let’s call it what it is) on fossil fuels to level the playing field for green energy technologies and also make them pay for the dirty backend damages that fossil fuels cause to our environment and our health. We need to stop emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere as soon as possible or revenues, profits, and economies will no longer matter.

Come on COP – 16 humanities last chance depends on you!

Here is a great book called Witness for the Earth that is about a religious perspective on environmental protection or "creation caring". It is a great discussion book for environmental church groups. Go to the Amazon link below and check it out.

http://www.amazon.com/Witness-Earth-Coalescing-Religious-Environmental/dp/1453871934/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1290866089&sr=1-6

How you can cut CO2 in your neighborhood.

I'm presenting Al Gore a copy of my book "Wild Pennsylvania

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2010/20101122_ChinaOpEd.pdfLatest report From Dr. James Hansen about Climate Change & China

Dr. James Hansen and I after a symposium

Are humans suicidal?

Since the mid 1990s the slogan for environmentalists has been “stop global warming.” Now that CO2 levels have reached 390 parts per million (PPM) and continue mounting at almost 3 PPM each year, there is no hope in “stopping” it. The best we can expect now is to mitigate the impacts that 390 PPM plus the yearly incremental increases will bring in coming decades, and to work urgently and diligently to lower CO2 levels to at least 350 PPM. Decades have passed with nothing done to cut CO2 emissions, bringing us to the do-or-die decade.
The bottom line is governments backed by wealthy fossil-based industries put short-term profits above climate stability. This short-sightedness will lead us to costs from climate related destruction that will eventually far exceed those profits. Once nations suffer from drastic climate related reductions in their ability to provide basic food and water needs for their citizens wars will break out over control of dwindling resources. Human survival in future decades will be difficult at best.
We’ve been through Kyoto and Copenhagen and see how money trumps science. We know how effective the fossil-based powerbroker’s disinformation campaigns are at stalling action to mitigate climate change.
Powerbrokers control legislators who create laws that protect powerbroker assets. If they lack the moral fortitude to put the wellbeing of future generations of human life above concerns for their short term profits it begs the question; is this a form of generational genocide? It sure looks that way.
Conversely, it stands to reason that younger generations have a moral right and obligation to protect their ability to survive which trumps the powerbrokers laws. If they sit back and do nothing it begs the question; are the younger generations suicidal? Survival mandates rebelling against unjust laws that protect the privileged at the expense of everyone else.
It’s obvious that the scientific and environmental communities have failed to educate people about climate change. The powerbrokers own the media and greatly outspend them in the information wars. This leaves us one conclusion, if humanity is to survive; we need to deal with the amoral powerbrokers with non-violent civil disobedience. This is the only way to achieve the change needed to survive in the coming decades.
Given the failure of past climate negotiations, it’s hard to believe anything effective will come from COP 16. Regardless, it’s too late to “stop climate change.” We can only hope to avert the magnitude of long-term impacts by cutting CO2 below 350 PPM as soon as possible. The longer we stall the worst each decade will get.
Younger generations have a right and a moral obligation to rebel against the powerbrokers in order to maintain an inhabitable planet. Drastic times require drastic measures. It is time to assert non-violent civil disobedience like boycotting fossil-based products, disrupting the flow of fossil energy, disrupting the activities of pro-fossil lobbyist, demanding serious government support for green energy, and demanding major investments in clean energy now! This is the do-or-die decade; time is running out.