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UPDATE X: "[Guess] what the more accurate, current number for the human-made CO2 pollution put into the air every year is?
40 billion tons."
Read Slate, Did I Say 30 Billion Tons of CO2 a Year? I Meant 40.
UPDATE IX: "In 2012, National Science Board member James Lawrence Powell investigated peer-reviewed literature published about climate change and found that out of 13,950 articles, 13,926 supported the reality of global warming. Despite a lot of sound and fury from the denial machine, deniers have not really been able to come up with a coherent argument against a consensus. The same is true for a somewhat different study that showed a 97 percent consensus among climate scientists supporting both the reality of global warming and the fact that human emissions are behind it.
Powell recently finished another such investigation, this time looking at peer-reviewed articles published between November 2012 and December 2013. Out of 2,258 articles (with 9,136 authors), how many do you think explicitly rejected human-driven global warming? Go on, guess!
One. Yes, one. . .
If you listen to Fox News, or right-wing radio, or read the denier blogs, you’d have to think climate scientists were complete idiots to miss how fake global warming is. Yet despite this incredibly obvious hoax, no one ever publishes evidence exposing it. Mind you, scientists are a contrary lot. If there were solid evidence that global warming didn’t exist, or that CO2 emissions weren’t the culprit, there would be papers in the journals about it. Lots of them."
Read Slate, The Very, Very Thin Wedge of Denial.
UPDATE VIII: That's 35 gigatons of CO2 each year "[f]or the roughly 7.2 billion people who live on Earth today. . .
A recent United Nations analysis of world population trends indicates global population growth shows no signs of slowing, with current projections estimating a staggering 11 billion people could inhabit the planet by the year 2100, faster growth than previously anticipated. The majority of this surge in population is likely to occur in sub-Saharan Africa, with the population of Nigeria expected to surpass that of theUnited States before 2050, according to the statistical analysis."
Read Discovery News, What 11 Billion People Mean for Climate Change.
And overpopulation is not the only problem, it is also over-consumption.
What happens as those 'other' people start "eating imported Argentinian beef. Drinking wine from Australia. Playing Wii on flat-screen televisions. Driving 4,000-pound sport utility vehicles. Driving 1,400-pound compact cars. Driving at all. Using toasters. Shopping for new jeans. Leaving the lights on in more than one room at a time (not an option). Turning on a heater. Turning on an air conditioner. Taking a bath. Urinating into drinking water. Eating corn. Eating beef at all, Argentinian or otherwise. Deciding which pair of shoes to wear. Flying on airplanes. Using toothpicks. . .
On a carbon scale, one American equals about 20 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, and 250 Ethiopians."
Read Slate, Is Overpopulation Really the Problem?
UPDATE VII: "Here’s a finding that shouldn’t be all that surprising: Since 1991, roughly 97 percent of all published scientific papers that take a position on the question agree that humans are warming the planet."
Read the Washington Post, Scientists agree on climate change. So why doesn’t everyone else?
UPDATE VI: "The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported on Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.
Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.
The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea. . .
From studying air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists know that going back 800,000 years, the carbon dioxide level oscillated in a tight band, from about 180 parts per million in the depths of ice ages, to about 280 during the warm periods between. The evidence shows that global temperatures and CO2 levels are tightly linked.
For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they expect far larger changes in the future."
Read The New York Times, Carbon Dioxide Level Passes Long-Feared Milestone.
UPDATE V: "For decades now, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have higher than at any point in the last 800,000 years — a fact scientists discovered by analyzing ancient air bubbles trapped in ice cores:
In fact, even that’s probably an understatement. Recent studies have estimated that current levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are at their highest levels since the Pliocene, the geologic era between five million and three million years ago. "
Read the Washington Post, Carbon-dioxide levels are at their highest point in at least 800,000 years.
UPDATE IV: 'Droughts, wildfires, and unprecedented heat waves,' might be one explanation for 35 gigatons of CO2 each year. Read the Washington Post, Odds of record U.S. heat being a random event: 1 in 1.6 million.
UPDATE III: "Back in 2010, Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist and self-proclaimed climate skeptic, decided to launch the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims. Remember, this was not long after the Climategate affair had erupted, at a time when skeptics were griping that climatologists had based their claims on faulty temperature data.
Muller’s stated aims were simple. He and his team would scour and re-analyze the climate data, putting all their calculations and methods online. Skeptics cheered the effort. . . The Charles G. Koch Foundation even gave Muller’s project $150,000 — and the Koch brothers, recall, are hardly fans of mainstream climate science.
So what are the end results? Muller’s team appears to have confirmed the basic tenets of climate science. Back in March, Muller told the House Science and Technology Committee that, contrary to what he expected, the existing temperature data was “excellent.” He went on: “We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups.” And, today, the BEST team has released a flurry of new papers that confirm that the planet is getting hotter. As the team’s two-page summary flatly concludes, “Global warming is real.”Here’s a chart comparing their findings with existing data:"
Read the Washington Post, A skeptical physicist ends up confirming climate data.
UPDATE II: Wonder what the deniers have to say about this? Read the Chicago Tribune, Stifling heat grips half U.S., some records set.
And take a look at the drought map, "the United States looks as if it has been set on fire and scorched at the bottom edge. Scorched is how much of the Southeast and Southwest feel, in the midst of a drought that is the most extreme since the 1950s and possibly since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The government has classified much of this drought as D4, which means exceptional. The outlook through late September shows possible improvement in some places, but in most of Texas, Oklahoma, southern Arkansas, and northern Louisiana and Mississippi the drought is expected to worsen."
I guess someone should ask Pastor Truthiness (who likes to attribute horrible events to God's wrath over any idea, person, or group he hates) why God is punishing the Bible Belt. Could it be a sign of his displeasure with Pastor Truthiness' sermon's of hate and his support of Middle East dictators?
UPDATE: Maybe that 35 gigatons of CO2 is causing global warming after all. Prof. Richard Muller, a UC Berkeley physicist who has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation . . . [aimed at showing] researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data. . . [and] hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth were surprised when "Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend 'very similar to that reported by the prior groups.'" Read the Los Angeles Times, Critics' review unexpectedly supports scientific consensus on global warming.
"Every year, human activity emits about 35 gigatons of CO2 (the most important greenhouse gas). Of that, 85% comes from fossil fuel burning. To a lot of people, that doesn't mean much -- who goes to the store and buys a gigaton of carrots? For a sense of perspective, a gigaton is about twice the mass of all people on earth, so 35 gigatons is about 70 times the weight of humanity. Every year, humans put that in the atmosphere, and 85% of that is power. Large actions, across whole nations and whole economies, are required to move the needle." Read The Atlantic, Why It's Hard to Talk About Energy.
