DID farting dinosaurs trigger global warming? The BBC reports that boffins have worked out the methane output of sauropods, including Brontosaurus. And they tell us that the dinosaurs produced 520 million tonnes of gas annually. They did this in methane farms. Dinosaurs were highly advanced technically and produced all their own power.
THIS really is the most glorious story. We’re told that we have to put up bat slicers all over the country in order to beat climate change. When, in fact, the bird choppers themselves create climate change:
Large windfarms can increase local night time temperatures by fanning warmer air onto the ground, new research has revealed. The study used satellite data to show that the building of huge wind farms in west Texas over the last decade has warmed the nights by up to 0.72C.
We should note that this is real science too, published in Nature and all.
A team of scientists will test whether climate change could push the Great Barrier Reef south.
A team from James Cook University and the University of Sydney will begin a study on Gardner Bank, near Fraser Island, to see whether the area could become an extension of the reef in the future.
OVER on Forbes.com, Steve Zwick says people who question climate change science are like jailed drugs addicts who will one day see the error of their ways. He says the “denial machine” is very well funded. Although, so is Al Gore. The money on each side of the debate is more even than he admits.
He then makes a threat:
What’s also there is a very public record of who has been lying to the public and who hasn’t – and it’s time to start using this information to make the liars and shirkers pay. Let’s take a page from those Tennessee firemen we heard about a few times last year – the ones who stood idly by as houses burned to the ground because their owners had refused to pay a measly $75 fee.
We can apply this same logic to climate change.
We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices.
TO southern Ontario, where young scholars are helping polar bears by getting cold:
Four students from Kenollie Public School jumped into the frigid pond behind the Port Credit Yacht Club on Sunday to raise awareness about the plight of polar bears in the face of global warming.
JAMES Hansen, of NASA – he’s Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies - reportedly, has been writing to Solvenia’s President – the foreigner taking it upon himself to tell an elected leader how to build greener power plants. Oddly, Hansen sees himself as the little guy up againt the machine. As the Telegraph reports:
Dr James Hansen, director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who first made warnings about climate change in the 1980s, said that public scepticism about the threat of man-made climate change has increased despite the growing scientific consensus …
He blamed sceptics who are opposed to major social and economic changes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for employing “tremendous resources” to undermine the scientific evidence.
AVRIL Mulcahy, 83, reportedly, has been advsied to find a new GP because her existing surgery is concerned about her health and, moreover, the health of the planet.
Five doctors at the West Road Surgery in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, signed a letter voicing their concerns over the patient’s “green travelling issues”. Her two-mile round-trip is a hazard to one and all. As such, Mrs Mulcahy, should register with a new GP within 28 days.
REMEMBER when polar bears were used to illustrate the man-made global melting? News media featured the sad bears sat on a small patches of ice. Well, polar bear numbers are up - 66 per cent higher than estimates. Polar bears are doing so well because scientists have been leaving them alone.
In Newfoundland the polar bears are attacking and making home visits. Two were shot dead just last week.
IT’S Earth Hour. Full Beam Ahead! Before the photos a few words from this year’s sponsor Sachin Tendukar?
I give my best to cricket and if, through this medium, I am able to raise awareness on the impact of climate change, then I would very much like to use this opportunity to reach out to my fans and ignite the fire in them to strive towards a better planet.
DID you know that climate sceptics are the news slave traders? Well, it’s true:
Scepticism regarding the need for immediate and massive action against carbon emissions is a sickness of societies and individuals which needs to be “treated”, according to an Oregon-based professor of “sociology and environmental studies”. Professor Kari Norgaard compares the struggle against climate scepticism to that against racism and slavery in the US South.
GLOBAL warming is making horse, cat and humans shrink. (Tell him.) Erin Burnett says global warming appears to be in full effect”. In life mirroring The Onion, Erin says those hybrid Australian killer sharks are coming to get you. At the Atlantis resort in Dubai sharks are shagging like mad. And not just the married ones:
So, the next time you’re outside enjoying the warm weather, remember this: those cherry blossoms might be really nice, but, yeah, they’re bringing super sharks with them. That was a truly disturbing story we stumbled upon.
Tens of thousands of anti-nuclear protesters across the globe called for an end to nuclear power as they marked the first anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami at Japan’s Fukushima power plant.
In Japan, tens of thousands rallied near the crippled plant, demanding an end to nuclear power as the nation held memorial ceremonies for a disaster that claimed almost 20,000 lives.
GLOBAL warming saves lives. The New York Times has news:
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this January was the fourth warmest in the documented history of weather in the contiguous United States.
If anything, the exceptional snowstorms of last winter and the uncommon gentleness of this one are further evidence of global warming, which is characterized by extreme and erratic weather patterns rather than an unceasing rise of the planet’s temperature.
The long-term troubles this sort of weather predicts are alarming. In the short term, however, our warm winter may have one unforeseen and felicitous consequence: a drastic reduction in the incidence of influenza.
…There has been a wide variation in the number of deaths attributable to influenza in past seasons — it has reached as high as 49,000 — but the average is around 12,000….it is likely that no more than a few hundred people in America, and possibly far fewer… For every individual who has been hospitalized this season, 22 people were hospitalized in the 2010-11 flu season. Even more strikingly, 122 children died of flu last season and 348 during the flu outbreak bvcof 2009-10 — while this time around that number is 3.
A changing climate isn’t just about floods, droughts and heatwaves. It brings erupting volcanoes and catastrophic earthquakes too… The idea that a changing climate can persuade the ground to shake, volcanoes to rumble and tsunamis to crash on to unsuspecting coastlines seems, at first, to be bordering on the insane.
He has examples.
Here in the UK, we only have to go back a couple years to April 2010, when the word on everyone’s lips was Eyjafjallajökull – the ice-covered Icelandic volcano that brought UK and European air traffic to a grinding halt. Less than a year ago, our planet’s ability to shock and awe headed the news once again as the east coast of Japan was bludgeoned by a cataclysmic combination of megaquake and tsunami, resulting – at a quarter of a trillion dollars or so – in the biggest natural-catastrophe bill ever.
LUCY Lawless, formerly Xena Princess Warrior, has been arrested for spending three days on a Shell oil ship Noble Discoverer with other Greenpeace activists. Says she:
“When we started this seven of us went up the rig but 133,000 came down with us in solidarity. They’re writing letters and we know that new heros are going to spring up in our fervent mission to make sure the oil industry becomes an energy industry is one that is renewable and clean.”
Lawless is going it “on behalf of the planet and her children“.
WHO wants a fun night out? Well, you might like to start by avoiding Sydney’s Cycle In Cinema:
Imagine a drive-in cinema with bikes instead of cars. Arrive early to plug your bike into a generator and take turns riding to power the performance. Each day brings something new: a special Queer Screen event, cult short films and music videos, and a curated program of new media including Indigenous voices.
PETER Gleick is the conduit of the so-called FakeGate missives. Gleick, founder of the Pacific Institute, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an expert on water resources, lied to get his hands on a documents from the Heartland Institute. He then made them public. George Monbiot was thrilled:
Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” pleaded the Wizard of Oz as Toto revealed the true identity of the man with the big, booming voice to Dorothy and her friends. But it was too late: the illusion was shattered.
The Heartland Institute, an influential rightwing thinktank based in Chicago, which has long pushed misinformation about climate change, is currently having its own Wizard of Oz moment following theleaking of internal documents which reveal the true extent of its funding and efforts to cast doubt on climate science.
In a sign of combat to come, Gleick has taken on a top Democratic operative and crisis manager, Chris Lehane. Lehane, who worked in the Clinton White House is credited for exposing the rightwing forces arrayed against the Democratic president. He was Al Gore’s press secretary during his 2000 run for the White House.
As one environmental campaigner said: “Now it’s gone nuclear.“
PETER H. Gleick, is a “water and climate analyst”. The New York Times says he has been “studying aspects of global warming”. His bio is impressive:
His research and writing address the critical connections between water and human health, the hydrological impacts of climate change, sustainable water use, privatization and globalization, and international conflicts over water resources.Dr. Gleick is an internationally recognized water expert and was named a MacArthur Fellow in October 2003 for his work. In 2001, Gleick was dubbed a “visionary on the environment” by the British Broadcasting Corporation.
The Pacific Institute’s Integrity of Science Initiative responds to and counters the assault on science and scientific integrity in the public policy arena, especially on issues related to water, climate change, and security.
But things have gone badly. Andew Revkin writes in the NYT:
Now, Gleick has admitted to an act that leaves his reputation in ruins and threatens to undercut the cause he spent so much time pursuing.
What Gleick says:
The Origin of the Heartland Documents
Peter Gleick
Since the release in mid-February of a series of documents related to the internal strategy of the Heartland Institute to cast doubt on climate science, there has been extensive speculation about the origin of the documents and intense discussion about what they reveal. Given the need for reliance on facts in the public climate debate, I am issuing the following statement.
TO help us better understand that weather is not climate, Australian Bureau of Meteorology and Victorian Department of Primary Industries have created a video to tell ADULTS that climate is caused by dogs. Clouds are sheep. Note: Weather in the UK is controlled by Tony Blair.
HOW can you tell global warming is real? Well, Agence France-Presse reports that counting the victims of shark attacks presents a handy guide:
Sharks killed twice as many swimmers and surfers last year than in 2010, with the increase due largely to a growth in tourism and changing shark patterns due to global warming.
IT’S chucking it down in New Sourth Wales, Austrailia.
The weather bureau has warned of severe thunderstorms with very heavy rain and possible flash flooding accompanied by damaging winds on Saturday in NSW covering an area stretching from Port Macquarie and Tamworth over Newcastle and Sydney as far south as Nowra in the south and Orange in the west.
IN 2007, the Environment Agency looked at sea level and its effects on London and the Thames estuary. Subsidence was found to be in the region of 1-2mm a year. Waters wer ruising at around 1mm a year. Together London was being submerged at rate of 2-3mm a year.
Plunge by Michael Pinsky, presented by Artsadmin and LIFT, consists of a series of public light installations marking the predicted 3012 sea level on London’s iconic monuments. It is a major new work of art which invites visitors to look up and look forward 1000 years to the year 3012, when the effects of runaway climate change will have completely changed the look of our capital city.
Artist Pinsky’s work will illustrate how sea levels will have climbed by then, should we fail to heed the threat of global warming. The artwork, which resembles rings of blue fire, will be erected at 28 metres above sea level on familiar icons across London in a disturbing and dazzling vision of apocalypse.
THE Guardian features a story called “Every windfarm mapped – and the MPs who hate them”. There’s one in Iran. Can it turn the spiritualists running that country off nuclear energy and on to wind?
Simon Rogers notes:
What difference do anti-windfarm MPs make? Conservative MPs have written to prime minister David Cameron demanding cuts to support for onshore windfarms and easier ways to block them through planning objections. We thought it would be interesting to show where those MPs are based – and where windfarms are either working, planned or in planning. This map is the result – what patterns do you think it shows?
Anorak is an independent online sensation exposing prejudice, inhumanity, stuff shirts, misogyny, a biased news agenda, conformity, misanthropy, spin and the worst and best of human culture in words, pictures and video.
