Heat is Online

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A Death of Beauty — Climate Change is Bleaching the Great Barrier Reef Out of Existence
Extinction.

It’s a hard, tough thing to consider. One of those possibilities people justifiably do not want to talk about. This notion that a creature we’re fond of and familiar with — a glorious living being along with all its near and distant relatives — could be entirely removed from the web of existence here on Earth.

Our aversion to the topic likely stems from our own fear of death. Or worse — the notion that the entire human race might eventually be faced with such an end. But extinction is a threat that we’ll see arising more and more as we force the world to rapidly warm. For species of the world now face existential crisis with increasing frequency as atmospheric and ocean temperatures have risen so fast that a growing number of them have simply become unable to cope with the heat.

The Great Barrier Reef of Australia — the world’s largest single structure made up of living organisms — is no exception. For this 1,440 mile long expanse of corals composed of more than 2,900 individual reefs that has existed in one form or another for 600,000 years has suffered a severe blow — one from which it may never be able to recover. OA Death of Beauty — Climate Change is Bleaching the Great Barrier Reef Out of Existence
Extinction.

It’s a hard, tough thing to consider. One of those possibilities people justifiably do not want to talk about. This notion that a creature we’re fond of and familiar with — a glorious living being along with all its near and distant relatives — could be entirely removed from the web of existence here on Earth.

Our aversion to the topic likely stems from our own fear of death. Or worse — the notion that the entire human race might eventually be faced with such an end. But extinction is a threat that we’ll see arising more and more as we force the world to rapidly warm. For species of the world now face existential crisis with increasing frequency as atmospheric and ocean temperatures have risen so fast that a growing number of them have simply become unable to cope with the heat.

The Great Barrier Reef of Australia — the world’s largest single structure made up of living organisms — is no exception. For this 1,440 mile long expanse of corals composed of more than 2,900 individual reefs that has existed in one form or another for 600,000 years has suffered a severe blow — one from which it may never be able to recover. O

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Record Global Heat — Huge Springtime Arctic Warm-up to Crush Sea Ice, Drive Extreme Jet Stream Dip into Europe
We know now, as soon as the middle of April, that 2016 will be the hottest year on record. That not only will it be the hottest year, but that it will crush any other previous record hot year by a wide margin.

NASA GISS head — Gavin Schmidt — in a recent tweet estimated that 2016 would fall into a range near 1.32 C above the 1880-1899 average that NASA uses for its preindustrial baseline. By comparison, 2015 — which was the most recent hottest year on record after 2014 (three in a row!) — hit 1.07 C above the 1880-1899 average.



(According to NASA, the first three months of 2016 were 1.25 C above the NASA 20th Century baseline and a ridiculous 1.47 C above the 1880 through 1899 preindustrial average. Image source: NASA GISS.)

As a result, 2016 will likely have jumped by about a quarter of a degree Celsius in a single year. If every year from 2016 on warmed up so fast the world would surpass the dreaded 2 C mark by 2019 and rocket to about +22 C above 19th Century averages by 2100. That’s not going to happen. Why?

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http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=7605&method=full



http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=26525&sid=f415caf023d6016c87a76f4b42652a75&start=2295

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Melt Expanding into East Antarctica as Nansen Ice Shelf Crack Produces 20 Kilometer Long Iceberg

Ever since 1999 a gigantic crack has been growing in the Nansen Ice Shelf in East Antarctica. By 2014, expansion of the crack accelerated. As of early 2016, the crevice had grown to 40 kilometers in length. Flooded by melt along the Ice Shelf’s warming surface and weakened by the heating of ocean waters from below, on April 7th, according to ESA reports, this East Antarctic Ice Shelf produced an immense 20 kilometer long iceberg. A towering block of ice covering an area larger than Manhattan floating on out toward the world’s shipping

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you got that right about politicians

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Republican Climate Change Denial is Blinding Our Ability to Observe the Arctic
Denial.

It’s all-too-often what happens to the powerful when they are confronted with the consequences of their own bad actions. It can best be said that denial is blindness — the willful inability to open one’s eyes to the tough reality of the world. In literature, we can see denial in the tragic sin of hubris and in the metaphor of Oedipus the King gouging his own eyes out as a result of his failure to come to terms with the warnings of prophecy.

In the psychological sense, denial involves the inability to cope with reality such that a person will act in an irrational fashion to the point of generating fantasies that the object of said denial does not exist. Behaviorally, this results in an increasing degradation of a person’s ability to confront or cope with the object of denial — to the point of ardent, irrational, and possibly destructive outbursts when faced with it.

Arctic sea ice loss.

Ever since 1979 an array of satellite sensors has allowed our scientists to directly observe the sea ice in the Arctic. Since that time, and as a human-forced warming of the world ramped up, the area which that ice covers has dramatically shrunken. So much so that by this year, 2016, there’s a risk that not only will a new all-time record low be reached, but that by the end of this summer almost all the ice in the Arctic Ocean will be melted out entirely. A risk that a new climate change related event will start to take shape in the Arctic. The blue ocean events.



(Arctic sea ice area as measured by observational satellites and most recently by F17. The bottom line of the graph measures days of the year. The left side of the graph measures sea ice area. The corresponding intersections determine sea ice area on any given day of a year in the record. The up and downward swoop of eac

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Climate Change Drives Half a Billion People to Suffer Hunger, Water Shortages as Droughts and Heatwaves Wreck Crops Across the Globe
At least 12 Indian states are believed to be facing famine and experts have warned that the water crisis could worsen if urgent action is not taken. — Greenpeace statement taken yesterday by The International Business Times.

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A human-forced warming of the globe is a trigger for increasingly severe droughts, water shortages, food shortages, and heatwaves intense enough to cause mass casualties. As global temperatures during 2015 and 2016 have risen to more than 1 degree Celsius above preindustrial readings, we’ve seen more and more reports coming in of these kinds of climate-change driven disruptions.

A new study out this week from the European Commission has found that 240 million people across the world are now suffering from food stress. With Greenpeace now warning that 330 million people in India alone are faced with water shortages and threat of famine, and with millions more coming under both food and water stress in Vietnam as a record Southeast Asian heatwave ramps up to never-before-seen extreme temperatures — it appears now that more than half a billion people around the world are dealing with a climate change driven food and water crisis.

It’s a growing global crisis that has now come to affect more than 45 nations. One that has put at least 80 million of those now suffering from hunger at a food stress level just one step below famine. One whose primary trigger appears to be widespread and expanding drought and extreme weather due to global temperatures hitting new all-time record highs.



(Despite what is probably the best global system ever devised to prevent and reduce hunger, the European Commission now finds that 240 million people are at risk of food stress. A number that is likely incomplete as a newly emerging heatwave in Southeast Asia is drying up food and water supplies for millions. Image source: The European Commission.)

It’s a situation that international agencies appear to be scrambling to keep track of. For with each passing week there appears to be new information about another country falling under food and water stress or of one already affected seeing conditions among strained populaces worsen.

Hunger Expanding Across The Globe

In the Equatorial and near-Equatorial regions of the world, nations are particularly vulnerable to the stress of rising temperatures. There, soil moisture is already tenuous in many regions. As temperatures rise, rates of evaporation increase and marginal areas can rapidly fall into drought. In addition, many regions reliant on glacier and snow melt to provide water during summer are seeing mountain snows vanish and high elevation glaciers dwindle away as consistently above freezing temperatures invade further and further into the higher elevations.

Across Africa, Southern and Eastern Asia, The Middle East, and Central America this story has been writ large as new climate change driven heat and dryness appears to have hit a tipping point this year. Severe heatwaves, droughts, and dwindling rivers are setting off intense hunger crises in North Korea, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt, Central Africa, and Nigeria — countries that now each host more than 10 million people under acute food stress. These are grim figures. But the numbers, in many cases, fail to tell the whole story of how dire the situation has actually become.

In North Korea, for example, officials there are warning of another Arduous March — a period of famine during the late 1990s and coinciding with droughts and rising global temperatures that killed more than 3.5 million in that country. Aid to North Korea during the 2000s alleviated some of the endemic hunger. But by the then record warm year of 2010 the droughts had re-emerged, and reports of hunger, stunted growth among children, and famine had again cropped up. In 2015, amidst global temperatures that had risen still higher, North Korea experienced its worst drought in at least 100 years. By as early as March, drought and heat had once-more settled in over a broad swath of Asia. And late last month, the state-run news agency Rodong Sinmun issued the following statement alluding to a rising risk of famine conditions in the country:

We may have to go on an arduous march, during which we will have to chew the roots of plants once again.



(A hothouse created by ongoing fossil fuel burning and related carbon emissions has set off droughts and heatwaves around the world leaving riverbeds and farmlands baked and bleached. Image source: India Water Portal.)

More than a score of other nations now see between 1-10 million people in their countries facing hunger. Places like Cambodia, Madagascar, Iraq, Pakistan, Venezuela, Libya, Hait

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Someone should tell those in the Netherlands about global warming: https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/arms ... taneously/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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And while we're taxing CO2 emissions lets start taxing water because, well, it's not free, it doesn't just fall from the sky ...
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Massive Wildfires Erupt in Northeast China as Lake Baikal Blazes Ignite
As human fossil fuel emissions force the world to warm, moisture and precipitation levels are changing. Wet areas become wetter.  Dry areas become drier. Spring and Summer temperatures increase. And earlier spring snow-melt causes soils to remain drier for longer periods, increasing incidents of drought while lengthening the wildfire season. These hot, dry conditions also increase the likelihood that, once wildfires are started by lightning strikes or human error, they will become more intense, larger and long-burning (paraphrase of this Union of Concerned Scientists Report).

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An extreme heatwave and drought in East Asia is now sparking extraordinarily large wildfires in mostly unsettled regions of Northeast China near the Russian border. The massive fires are plainly visible in the LANCE-MODIS satellite shot and include at least four contiguous

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See Earth’s Temperature Spiral Toward 2°C

Published: May 9th, 2016




http://www.climatecentral.org/news/see- ... d-2c-20332" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

By Andrea Thompson

The steady rise of Earth’s temperature as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere and trap more and more heat is sending the planet spiraling closer to the point where warming’s catastrophic consequences may be all but assured.

That metaphoric spiral has become a literal one in a new graphic drawn up by Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. The animated graphic features a rainbow-colored record of global temperatures spinning outward from the late 19th century to the present as the Earth heats up.

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Polar Heatwave Digs in as Arctic Sea Ice Crashes — Blue Ocean Event Looking More and More Likely
We’ve never seen May heat like what’s being predicted in the Arctic over the next seven days. A shot of warm airs blowing northward over Siberia that are expected to generate a warm front that takes in nearly the entire Arctic Ocean. A weather pattern that, if it emerges, will completely compromise the central region of polar cold that has traditionally driven Northern Hemisphere weather patterns.

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This week, a huge pulse of warm air rose up over Northwest Canada and Alaska. Invading the Beaufort, it drove a broad warm front which forced near or above freezing temperatures over between 1/4 to 1/3 of the Arctic Ocean zone. Regions from the East Siberian Sea, through the Chukchi, into the Beaufort, and including a chunk of the polar zone above the 80th parallel all experienced these anomalously warm readings. By Friday, air temperature anomalies in the entire Arctic zone above 66 North were about 3 C above average and in a large section of the hot zone centered on the Beaufort temperatures ranged between 10-15 C above average. For the Arctic, it appeared that June had arrived a month early.

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April breaks global temperature record, marking seven months of new highs
Latest monthly figures add to string of recent temperature records and all but assure 2016 will be hottest year on record


Global land and sea temperature was 1.11C warmer in April 2016 than the average temperature for April during the period 1951-1980.

Sunday 15 May 2016 20.28 EDT Last modified on Sunday 15 May 2016 22.08 EDT

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Let's give up the climate change charade: Exxon won't change its stripes
Bill McKibben





also see

India




Indians demand government action after temperatures hit 51C
Hospitals struggle to cope as patient numbers soar and cold water in short supply after hottest day

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/m ... es-hit-51c" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Youths cool off in Kolkata. Temperatures are expected to stay high in June. Photograph: Piyal Adhikary/EPA
Vidhi Doshi in Mumbai and Jon Boone in Islamabad
Friday 20 May 2016 09.37 EDT Last modified on Friday 20 May 2016 10.45
also see

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Wet Bulb Near 35 C — Heatwave Mass Casualties Strike India Amidst Never-Before-Seen High Temperatures
Never-before-seen high temperatures and high humidity are resulting in thousands of heat injuries and hundreds of heat deaths across India. In some places, wet bulb readings appear to be approaching 35 C — a level of latent heat never endured by humans before fossil fuel burning forced global temperatures to rapidly warm. A reading widely-recognized as the limit of human physical endurance and one whose more frequent excession would commit the human race to enduring an increasing number of episodes of killing heat. A boundary that scientists like Dr. James Hansen warned would be exceeded if a human-forced warming of the world was not halted.

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And it is in this newly dangerous climate context that temperatures near 125 degrees Fahrenheit settled in over India’s border region with Pakistan yesterday. A blistering wave of crippling heat hitting never-before-seen readings over that highly-populated nation. In Phalodi, India, the mercury rocketed to 123.8 degrees Fahrenheit (51 degrees Celsius). This reading exceeded India’s previous all-time record high for any location which stood at 123.1 degrees Fahrenheit (50.6 degrees Celsius) set on May 25, 1886. Across the border in Pakistan, temperatures crossed “critical” thresholds this week, hitting 124.7 degrees Fahrenheit (51.5 degrees Celsius) Thursday in the city of Jacobabad as officials in that state issued health warnings to the public.

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Multi-Day ‘Siege of Storms’ Follows Exxon Shareholder Meeting
A multi-day siege of severe thunderstorms morphed into a major flash flood event in parts of Texas, Kansas, and other states late Thursday into Friday, and more severe weather is expected into Friday night. — Weather Underground.

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It was a stifling hot and humid day that set the scene for the Exxon shareholder meeting this week. There, in Dallas, Texas on Wednesday, oil company CEO Rex Tillerson found himself besieged by environmentalists enraged over his company’s decades-long campaign to misinform the public on climate change and by shareholders concerned about the company’s future prospects. But what the climate change denying oil company CEO, and even NOAA weather forecasters, didn’t know was that an extreme rainfall event worsened by the very smoke and fumes emitted by Exxon was starting to gather over Southeast Texas — not far from where the shareholder proceedings were taking place.



(Protesters urge stockholders to dump Exxon in a push for accountability over Exxon’s deceptive language and media campaigns related to emissions-based climate change. Image source: Exxon Facing Heat Over Climate Change.)

At the meeting, Rex Tillerson, set to retire in 2017, spewed out his usual pro-fossil-fuel rhetoric — defending the myth that oil represents the inevitable mainstay of global energy and concocting various straw-man arguments imagining oil protesters filling up cars with gasoline or flying jet airplanes to join in an array of embittered protests surrounding this week’s shareholder meeting. Rallying the board of directors, Tillerson managed to deflect numerous shareholder attempts to positively modify Exxon’s behavior with regards to fossil fuel emissions and responses to climate change. Outside the meeting, protestors called for keeping oil reserves in the ground, urged Exxon to transition to a non-fossil fuel based energy company and acknowledge and prepare for climate change, or urged Exxon investors to dump stock holdings in response to the company’s decades-long-effort to stifle effective climate action.

Outside the meeting, a 13 foot long ice statue spelling out the words — #ExxonKnew — rapidly melted in the sweltering heat of an atmosphere roiled by the powerful climate-altering forces fossil fuel entities like Exxon had already unleashed upon the airs :( of our world.

‘Siege of Storms’ Batters Texas

By Thursday, the day after Exxon’s shareholder meeting, an expansive trough had extended down from Canada and over Texas. Exploiting this hole in an increasingly weakened Jet Stream cool, Arctic airs plunged south. Crossing the Great Plains into Texas, this unstable atmospheric mass came directly into confrontation with a super-heated, moist flow rising off the Gulf of Mexico and Pacific Ocean.



(Very heavy storms firing off over Southeastern Texas have dumped record amounts of rainfall over portions of the state and set off a flash flood emergency. Image source: NOAA.)

Both the big Jet Stream dip and the extreme moisture content in the airs over Texas were not normal. Both were new features enabled by a human-forced (Exxon-forced) warming of the world. For with global temperatures early this year spiking to 1.4 C above 1880s values, the planetary atmosphere is now enabled to contain about a ten percent higher moisture load than during the late 19th Century. It’s a weird new atmosphere that is now capable of producing storms with previously unimaginable heights of 70,000 feet over temperate Latitudes. And as the current

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Half of Thailand's Weather Sites Break All-time Heat Records in 42 Days
By: Christopher C. Burt , 9:09 PM GMT on May 30, 2016


Half of Thailand's Weather Sites Break All-time Heat records in 42 Days

All-time national heat records have been set this past April and May in India, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and the Republic of Maldives. The unprecedented heat has killed hundreds in India and dozens in Thailand so far. But nothing in the record books can compare to what has recently occurred in Thailand: a large country with over 120 meteorological sites that has seen half of its official weather stations break their all-time heat records. Here are the details.

We knew the ‘super’ El Nino this past year would have a big affect on the world’s climate. It did not produce the hoped for big rains in California but it did produce the heat and drought in Southeast Asia as forecast. Of all the countries effected the most by this event Thailand has proven to see something exceptional weather-wise: more than half of all the country’s official weather sites reported their all-time heat records during the months of April and May. Thailand’s meteorological service only dates back to 1951 but it is a large country with over 120 official




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Pattern Shift Will Bring Potential Record Heat to the West, Cool and Wet Conditions in the East


Linda Lam
Published: May 31, 2016
A shift in the weather pattern is ahead for much of the country as May ends and June begins.

This shift will bring temperature changes for many, as well as an increase of showers and thunderstorms across portions of the South and East.

This change in the weather pattern will begin early this week. An upper-level trough, or southward dip in the jet stream, that has been in place over the West will slowly slide eastward and be replaced by an upper-level ridge of high pressure. 

Late Week Setup
Very warm temperatures are expected to build across the West as the week progresses, just in time for the start of meteorological summer (June 1-August 31). 

Meanwhile, cooler conditions will be found across parts of the East, although

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India’s Monsoon is Delayed For Third Year in a Row — Climate Change is Likely Cause
“It has been observed that since 2001, places in northern India, especially in Rajasthan, are witnessing a rising temperature trend every year. The main reason is the excessive … emission of carbon dioxide.” — Laxman Singh Rathore, the director general of the India Meteorological Department.

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The reduction in India’s monsoon rains is a big deal. It generates systemic drought, creates a prevalence for heatwaves, and locally amplifies the impacts of human-caused climate change. For three years now, the Indian monsoon has been delayed. India is experiencing its worst heatwaves ever recorded and water shortages across the country are growing dire. The monsoonal rains are coming, again late. And people across India — residents as well as weather and climate experts — are beginning to wonder if the endemic drought and heat stress will ever end.

Historically, there was only one climate condition known to bring about a delay in India’s Monsoon — El Nino. And last year, a strong El Nino is thought to have contributed both to the Monsoon’s late arrival and to a very severe drought that is now gripping the state. What the 2015 El Nino cannot also account for is the 2014 delay and weakening of monsoonal rains. And during 2016, as India’s monsoon has again been held back by 1-2 weeks, and El Nino is now but a memory, it’s beginning to become quite clear that there’s something else involved in the weakening of India’s annual rains.

Indian Monsoon Delayed Third Year in a Row



(Onset of the Indian Monsoon has been delayed for three years in a row now. A condition likely caused by a human-forced warming of the world and one that is worsening an extreme drought and heatwave situation across the country. Image source: The India Meteorological Department.)

As of today, the eastern edge of the Southeast Asian monsoon had only advanced to the middle of Myanmar. This late progress is two weeks behind the typical advance of the monsoon in this part of the world at this time of year. Further west, the monsoon has extended somewhat futher — only trailing the typical monsoon’s advance by 5 days along the western coast of India.

With La Nina blooming in the Eastern Pacific, there’s no other climatological excuse for this delay. The El Nino influence is mostly gone. And all that’s left is a global climate context in which temperatures have now risen to around 1.3 C hotter than 1880s averages.

Climate Change is Likely Cause

Scientific studies modeling the impacts of human-forced warming have long found that heating the Earth atmosphere resulted in an eventual delay and weakening of the Indian monsoon. A study published last year in Geoscience Frontiers continued this line of study. Global Circulation Model (GCM) runs found that the Indian monsoon was expected to be delayed by 15 days on average during the 21st Century due to human caused climate change. That the amount of precipitation provided by the monsoon would be reduced by about 7

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Al Gore’s Revenge — Internal Combustion Engines Stink and This Ridiculously Powerful Electric Turbine Truck Proves It
As of yesterday, Nikola Motors announced the performance specs and preorders for its new hybrid electric long-haul truck. It’s a ridiculously awesome design — one that boasts across the board superior performance when compared to internal combustion engine based trucks that are currently available. The company producing this amazing feat of electrical hybrid vehicle engineering calls its new vehicle the Nikola One. But we’re going to have some fun at the expense of climate change deniers and electric vehicle detractors both here and call this thing Al Gore’s Revenge.

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(Nikola One aka Al Gore’s Revenge. It’s big, it’s red, it’s mean, it’s electric — and it’s about to eat internal combustion engine based trucking market share for lunch. Image source: Nikola Motor Company.)

If there’s ever been a name that climate change deniers tried to turn into a nasty joke, it’s Al Gore. Back in the late 1990s, Al Gore displayed amazing foresight and did the prescient, responsible thing by working to incentivize a transition to electrical vehicles. He rightfully attacked internal combustion engines for the inefficient, wasteful and fossil-fuel dependent beasts that they were. Calling them infernal internals, he was probably the first person of political standing to make the apt link, in reference, between climate change and hell on Earth.

For his good deeds and for his speaking truth to the political and economic powers of the day, Gore was largely demonized in the fossil fuels industry supported republican media. Pretty much anyone who defended Al Gore was attacked. And, for a while, despite a glaringly huge and growing scientific consensus, climate change deniers pretended that the notion of human caused climate change itself was the sole mental invention of this sensitive and thoughtful man.

Now, though, the joke is on the climate change deniers and on the fossil fuel industries, like Peabody Coal, who paid to support their demonization of climate leaders. For now even the fossil fuel haven that was long haul trucking is starting to fall due to the superior physical performance potentials of electric engines.

Al Gore’s Revenge — Electric Engines Aren’t Just Cleaner, They’re Better

Nikola One is an 18 wheel long haul trucking rig. Powered by an electric turbine engine, its 320 kwh battery pack is capable of propelling the vehicle, without the aid of any additional tanked fuel source, more than 190 miles. Tanked fuel then lengthens the legs of the more efficient electrical turbine giving it an ultimate total systems range of 1,200 miles. By comparison, an ICE-powered standard truck typically boasts a range of just 500 miles. As a result, the combined fuel efficiency of this massive rig is between 10 and 15 miles per gallon. This is 2-3 times the fuel efficiency rating of standard long haul trucks and about the fuel efficiency averag

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Two stories


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Exxon Sues MA Attorney General In Retaliatory Attempt To Intimidate ‘Exxon Knew’ Climate Accountability Movement
Acting like a wounded and cornered beast, ExxonMobil has launched what appears to be a blatantly retaliatory and frivolous lawsuit against Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.

Beneath a very thin veil, this legal maneuver by Exxon is seemingly an effort to intimidate any and all who seek to hold the oil giant accountable for its multi-million dollar campaign to attack climate science and sow doubt through decades of deception.

Just to remind everyone – 17 Attorneys General are investigating what Exxon knew about climate science and when, as well as what the company has done to potentially mislead policymakers and the public in order to delay action to address climate change.

Exxon has claimed that there has always been uncertainty within the company about the role of fossil fuels in causing climate change.

Yet, as InsideClimate News and the LA Times and Columbia School of Journalism and the Center for International Environmental Law and other investigations have pointed out, Exxon and others in the oil industry had advanced knowledge of the link between fossil fuel combustion and global warming decades ago.

And DeSmog uncovered an Exxon document that unequivocally stated the company’s knowledge in the late 1970s. Read DeSmog's investigation: “There is no doubt”: Exxon Knew CO2 Pollution Was A Global Threat By


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Conservative Funders of Climate Denial Are Quietly Spending Millions To Generate More Partisan Journalism
Millions of dollars have been pouring into conservative media outlets and student journalism projects from the same groups funding climate science denial, a DeSmog analysis has found.

Analysis of IRS tax filings shows the funding groups, including some linked to the oil billionaire Koch brothers, are trying to combat a perceived left-wing bias in media with cash to ideologically-aligned projects.

Many of the funded journalism projects also produce stories that claim human-caused climate change is either a liberal hoax or that policies to mitigate it, such as promotion of renewable energy, are an unnecessary drag on the economy.

DeSmog found that two linked funds — Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund — have been a key source of cash for organisations attacking climate science and opposing policies

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122 degrees: Palm Springs breaks record — and it could get hotter

Coping with the heat wave in Southern California

June 20, 2016, 6:46 p.m.
Every so often someone walks into the Palm Springs Visitors Center raring to burn through hiking trails like they're British adventurer and TV personality Bear Grylls.

For those people, Ceej Juarez, who provides information about hiking trails in the Agua Caliente Indian reservation, has to be a voice of reason.  And that is never as important a job as it was on Monday, when a torrid heat wave sent temperatures to 122 degrees in the resor

[msfreeh]

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Scribbling for environmental, social and economic justice



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A Season of Record Melt — Sea Ice Extent In Uncharted Territory For 94 Days
From March 25th through June 26th, sea ice extent measures, as provided by Japan’s Arctic data system were in record low ranges. In other words, for about a quarter of a year, and according to this monitor, the Arctic Ocean and its surrounding estuaries have witnessed the lowest ice coverage ever measured for any similar period since record keeping began in the 1979.



(An amazingly long period of record low sea ice extents in JAXA’s sea ice monitor.)

This new period of extreme sea ice record lows comes during a time of continuous decadal sea ice losses. Average sea ice coverage for each successive ten year period since the 1980s during the March through June period has fallen by about 400,000 to 500,000 square kilometers. For 2016, the new record lows widened this gap to more than 2 million square

[msfreeh]

https://robertscribbler.com/2016/07/05/ ... hern-tier/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;




Fahrenheit 85.9 Near Arctic Ocean Shores — Extreme Heatwave Settles in Over North-Central Siberia, Canada’s Northern Tier
70.8 North, 69.2 East. It’s the Lat, Long coordinate location of a section of the Yamal Peninsula in Siberian Russia. A typically chilly region of frozen but now thawing ground more than 4 degrees of Latitude north of the Arctic Circle. A place that saw the appearance of odd, disturbing (and now controversial) methane blowholes pockmarking

[msfreeh]

https://climatecrocks.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;