Our Oceans are Under Attack

Some rules are rather silly. I guess freedom and sustainability are both somewhat relative terms, like most things in life. Smaller boats often provide more freedom and sustainability, but there are practical limits. I'm just glad I don't have to put a holding tank and 100 amp entrance and pay property tax and water and sewage on my Laser and Yngling, but I suppose that day may come.

 

The Richest Countries on Earth Just Agreed to Stop Your Great-Grandchildren From Using Fossil Fuels

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/06/g7-fossil-fuels-climate-change

The global economy must be completely fossil fuel–free by the end of the century. That point of climate consensus came out of a meeting today between the US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the European Union, which make up the G7.

In the interest of preventing the planet from warming by more than 2 degrees Celsius, the nations said in a joint statement, "we emphasize that deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required with a decarbonisation of the global economy over the course of this century." To that end, the nations agreed to work toward cutting emissions by between 40 and 70 percent by 2050.

Environmental groups praised the G7 announcement, which they had worried would be derailed by dissent from Japan and Canada. "The decisions made by the G7 today indicated an acknowledgement that there needs to be a phase-out of climate-killing coal and oil by 2050 at the latest," said Greenpeace’s head of international climate politics, Martin Kaiser. "Merkel and Obama succeeded in not allowing Canada and Japan to continue blocking progress towards tackling climate change."

After the Fukushima disaster, Japan backed away from nuclear energy, and has drawn criticism for favoring coal over renewables. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s administration has leaned heavily on Alberta’s tar sands as a potential economic boon for the country, and has been notoriously unfriendly to climate campaigners who disagree.

In a statement, the Sierra Club called today "the first time that the leaders of the world have made clear with one voice that we must get off fossil fuels completely."

 

I think it might also be one of the few times in history that world leaders have set a date for anything so far into the future. I suppose there are some other examples like UK turning Hong Kong back over to China. It is good to see them making commitments far into the future, but the actions that they take this year, and in the next 5 years, will show just how serious the G7 countries actually are. It seems that Harper will be voted out of office this coming fall, if his current drop in popularity continues. The trouble with democracies is you never really know who is running the country.

 

Great new Machine turns dairy shed effluent into drinkable water to be displayed at National Agricultural Fieldays at Mystery Creek near Hamilton New Zealand.

Would it not be better to not make the mess in the first place?

 

The concept of "cutting emissions by between 40 and 70 percent by 2050" is not at all compatible with "preventing the planet from warming by more than 2 degrees Celsius". The G7 announcement is delusional.

What they are really saying, while pretending not to, is that we're going to go way over the 2 degree point.

 

our aceans are under attack

Removing the false economies from trade practices would be a good start to saving energy.

 

Secretive donors gave US climate denial groups $125m over three years

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...s-climate-denial-groups-125m-over-three-years

The secretive funders behind America’s conservative movement directed around $125m (£82m) over three years to groups spreading disinformation about climate science and committed to wrecking Barack Obama’s climate change plan, according to an analysis of tax records.

The amount is close to half of the anonymous funding disbursed to rightwing groups, underlining the importance of the climate issue to US conservatives.

The anonymous cash flow came from two secretive organisations – the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund – that have been called the “Dark Money ATM” of the conservative movement.

Robert Brulle, a professor at Drexel University who first exposed the conservative network of think tanks and activist groups of the climate change counter-movement, said those funds helped hone opposition to regulations.

“It is a well-oiled, complicated, cultural and political machine of the right wing of the conservative movement,” he said.

In 2013, the two organisations took in just over $152m, distributing $90m to a constellation of groups. However, the ultimate sources of those funds were untraceable, an important consideration for companies or individuals wanting to avoid bad publicity for rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change.

Another big beneficiary of the anonymous funds, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has received $4.3m over three years, claims on its website that climate change is its biggest programme.

“CEI questions global warming alarmism,” the website reads. Last year, CEI sued the White House over a video linking the chill Arctic blasts of the polar vortex to climate change. The CEI has also tried – unsuccessfully – to sue climate scientists.

The thinktank would not respond to requests for comment.

“All these corporations that were getting bad press realised they can still fund conservative thinktanks,” Dunlap said. “Exxon or BP can still fund one of these things while doing all these great things on climate change to reduce emissions etc.”

 

What causes ancient oceans to rise?

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/climate-change/news/article.cfm?c_id=26&objectid=11463462

A long-standing mystery over why the world's sea level was dramatically higher 135,000 years ago than it is today is closer to being solved by scientists.

In a major study, published today in the leading journal Nature, an international team of researchers found the ancient sea levels were pushed up following a dramatic ice sheet collapse that also triggered widespread climate changes.

The change, which took place amid a chain of major events following the end of the ice age before last, holds lessons for scientists today trying to understand the complex processes that control large transformations in the Earth's climate.

The team had set out to answer why the sea level had overshot its present levels during the last interglacial period, when Earth's temperature was only slightly warmer than it is today.

"If most of the meltwater that produced the six-to-nine metre sea level rise came from Antarctica, then New Zealand would have experienced higher sea levels than present, but not quite as high as the six to nine metre global average."

Ultimately, Professor Naish said, the study suggested that the Antarctic ice sheet - especially its marine-based parts - was very sensitive to ocean and atmosphere warming of the scale that Earth was currently experiencing, and will experience in the future.

GNS Science senior scientist Nancy Bertler said the paper made the argument that Antarctic warming was the engine behind the "surprisingly high" ice loss and sea level increase during the last interglacial period, considering the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was only at 280 parts per million - the level stands at around 400 parts per million today.

 

We'll All Eat Less Meat Soon—Like It or Not

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/06/less-meat-smil

The great bulk of American beef comes from cows that have been fattened in confined yards with thousands of of their peers, munching a diet of corn, soybeans, and chemical additives. Should the feedlot model, innovated in the United States in the middle of the 20th century, continue its global spread—or is it better to raise cows on pasture, eating grass?

The question is critical, because global demand for animal flesh is on the rise, driven by growing appetites for meat in developing countries, where per capita meat consumption stands at about a third of developed-world levels.

In a much-shared interview on the website of the Breakthrough Institute, Washington State University researcher Judith Capper informs us that the US status quo is the way forward. "If we switched to all grass-fed beef in the United States, it would require an additional 64.6 million cows, 131 million acres more land, and 135 million more tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions," she said. "We’d have the same amount of beef, but with a huge environmental cost."

Is the feedlot system itself sustainable? That is, can we keep stuffing animals—not just cows but also chickens and pigs—into confinements and feeding them gargantuan amounts of corn and soybeans? And can other countries mimic that path, as China is currently?

The answer, plainly, is no, according to the eminent ecologist Vaclav Smil in a 2014 paper. Smil notes that global meat production has risen from less than 55 million tons in 1950 to more than 300 million tons in 2010—a nearly six-fold increase in 60 years. "But this has been a rather costly achievement because mass-scale meat production is one of the most environmentally burdensome activities," he writes, and then proceeds to list off the problems: it requires a large-scale shift from diversified farmland and rainforests to "monocultures of animal feed," which triggered massive soil erosion, carbon emissions, and coastal "dead zones" fed by fertilizer runoff. Also, concentrating animals tightly together produces "huge volumes of waste," more than can be recycled into nearby farmland, creating noxious air and water pollution. Moreover, it's "inherently inefficient" to feed edible grains to farm animals, when we could just eat the grain, Smil adds.
This ruinous system would have to be scaled up if present trends in global meat demand continue, Smil writes—reaching 412 million tons of meat in 2030, 500 million tons in 2050, and 577 million tons in 2080, according to projections from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. Such a carnivorous future is "possible but it is neither rational nor sustainable"—it will ultimately destroy the ecosystems on which it relies.

Meanwhile, US meat consumption, long among the very highest in the world, is waning, if slowly. The total annual slaughter peaked at 9.5 billion animals in 2009, and has been hovering around 9.1 billion in recent years.

 

Norway Will Divest From Coal in Push Against Climate Change | New York Times

 

‘Republicans’ leading climate denier tells the pope to butt out of climate debate’..

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...inhofe-republican-climate-denier-pope-francis

Washington’s notorious snowball-thrower was at it again – even on a June day with forecast highs of 92 degrees – as the Senate’s most powerful environmental leader delivered a pep talk to activists who deny the science behind climate change.

Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, who now chairs the Senate environment and public works committee despite famously calling global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”, took a star turn on Thursday at the Heartland Institute, whose conferences function as a hub for climate deniers.

His message – that “God is still up there” and that Pope Francis should mind his own business – sent a clear signal to his fellow conservatives: climate sceptics have a loyal – and newly powerful – friend in Congress.

Actually, there was more than one: Lamar Smith, the Texas congressman who heads the science, space and technology committee, raised cheers from the room when he said he proposed a 40% cut in Nasa’s budget for earth sciences last week.

In the world outside, anticipation was building for the pope to deliver his much-awaited encyclical next week, when he is expected to cast climate change as a moral issue.

The senator, in the company of friends and fellow disbelievers, handed out a page of 12 talking points for those confronted by evidence of climate change. He urged Heartland activists to go out and fight against what he called “the myth of global warming”.

He stood by his claim that climate change was a hoax, he told reporters later, even though it is not. The pope could do little to change his mind, he said – although the Catholic leader’s position on climate science certainly seemed to be a sensitive point for Inhofe.

“Everyone is going to ride the pope now. Isn’t that wonderful,” he said. “The pope ought to stay with his job, and we’ll stay with ours.”

A few moments later, Inhofe said: “I am not going to talk about the pope. Let him run his shop, and we’ll run ours.”

 

Nations warn time running short to prepare Paris climate deal | Reuters

 

Stop using China as an excuse for inaction on climate change

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...un/12/china-excuse-inaction-on-climate-change

Invoking Yellow Peril tropes over China’s carbon footprint fails to recognise the fact its energy use is tied to our consumption, the country’s coal demand is dropping and Chinese people care more about climate than we do

But perhaps the biggest surprise for those who unwittingly invoke the old Yellow Peril tropes is that the Chinese people care more about climate change than we do. A survey released on Monday reveals that 26% of respondents in the UK and 32% in the US believe that climate change is “not a serious problem”, while in China the figure is only 4%. In the UK, 7% don’t want their government to endorse any international agreement addressing climate change. In the US the proportion rises to 17%. But in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, only 1% want no action taken.

The paternalistic assumption that only the rich nations can afford to care is also based on myth: a myth that – like the Yellow Peril story – dates back to the colonial era. As the Greendex survey of consumer attitudes shows, people in poorer countries tend to feel much guiltier about their impacts on the natural world than people in rich countries, even though those impacts might be far smaller. Of the nations surveyed, the people of Germany, the US, Australia and Britain felt the least consumer guilt; while the people of India, China, Mexico and Brazil felt the most. The more we consume, the less we feel.

There is no scope for moral superiority in the climate talks, least of all a moral superiority based on unfounded national stereotypes. Collectively, we are wrecking the delicate atmospheric balance that has allowed human civilisation to flourish. Collectively, we have to sort this out. And it will happen only by taking responsibility for our impacts, rather than by blaming other nations for what we don’t want to do.

 

Tony Abbott brags about halting the spread of 'visually awful' wind farms

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...ad-of-visually-awful-wind-farms-10314422.html

With a 22,300-mile coastline, offshore winds and almost perpetual sunshine, Australia could be leading the world in replacing carbon-spewing fossil fuels with renewable-energy sources.

That is unlikely to happen, though, under Tony Abbott, who has proclaimed coal to be “good for humanity” – and who revealed that he detests wind farms, calling them noisy and “visually awful”.

To the dismay of the multi-billion-dollar clean-energy sector, and to the mortification of many Australians, Mr Abbott bragged that he had halted the spread of wind farms by slashing the amount of energy to be generated by renewable sources by 2020.

Explaining a compromise which he reached with opposition parties in the Senate last month to cut the target by 20 per cent, he told a right-wing radio host, Alan Jones: “What we did recently in the Senate was to reduce… the number of these things [wind farms] we are going to get in the future.”

He added: “I frankly would have liked to have reduced the number a lot more. But we got the best deal we could, and if we hadn’t had a deal, we would have been stuck with even more of these things… I’ve been up close to these wind farms, there’s no doubt that not only are they visually awful but they make a lot of noise.”

The comments were described as “gobsmacking” by the Labor Party, which said they did not augur well for Australia’s participation in the key climate change conference in Paris later this year.

Mr Abbott – who abolished a carbon-pricing scheme on coming to power and has dismissed “the climate change argument” as “absolute crap” – is already out of step with other developed nations, such as France and the US, who want more ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions.

While he now claims to accept the science behind man-made climate change, his government is considered one of the most environmentally hostile in living memory.

It has sanctioned a cull of endangered great white sharks in Western Australia, permitted dredging spoil to be dumped on the Great Barrier Reef and attempted to have ancient Tasmanian forests removed from the World Heritage List.

During the radio interview, Mr Abbott also appeared to give credence to concerns about the health impacts of wind turbines – although the government’s own National Health and Medical Research Council reported in February that there was “no consistent evidence” of adverse effects. “I do take your point about the potential health impact of these things,” he told Jones, an outspoken opponent of wind farms.

The Australian Wind Alliance, a pro-wind energy group, called his comments “extraordinary”. Mr Abbott had “admitted to setting out deliberately to destroy a viable industry in Australia, one that could provide jobs to many Australians, investment to regional communities and new income to farmers”, it said.

Mark Butler, Labor’s environment spokesman, said it was astonishing that the Prime Minister could be “so short-sighted and so out of touch”.

 

How the US could achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2050

How the US could achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2050

http://www.gizmag.com/united-states-renewable-energy-2050/37938/

Just think of some of the many ancillary problems this could help solve.

What if we had spent those trillions of dollars on this pursuit rather than that Iraq fiasco !!!!
Where would the USA's and the world's economy be now.!!!

http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2015/pr-50states-renewable-energy-060815.html