Lloyd Alter of Treehugger says that the following post by Kaid Benfield of NRDC Switchboard is his favourite of the year:
Hottest Year In History Ends With Freak Climate Disasters
As greenhouse pollution continues to build in the atmosphere, 2010 is entering the history books as the hottest year on record. A year of unprecedented extreme weather disasters, 2010 is ending with yet more climate disasters, from floods in Australia to winter tornadoes across America:
Parts of Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee were on the lookout for more twisters after several touched down Friday — including one that killed three people in an Arkansas town. Two more people died in southern Missouri. Three people died in Cincinnati, a hamlet of about 100 residents about three miles from the Oklahoma border. An elderly couple died in their home, while a dairy farmer was killed while milking his cows.
The tornadoes are part of an “unusual” storm front fed by “warm, moist air in place over the region.” On the colder edge of the front, “the storm responsible for the deadly tornado is also bringing a dangerous winter storm to the West and Midwest,” with up to three feet of new snow from California to Idaho.
Meanwhile, Australia is being ravaged by unprecedented flooding, following tremendous rainfall for months, compounded by the Christmas Day landfall of Cyclone Tasha. Floods now cover an area “the size of France and Germany combined.” Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced millions of dollars of relief funding as she described the record-breaking floods:
Some communities are seeing floodwaters higher than they’ve seen in decades, and for some communities floodwaters have never reached these levels before [in] the time that we have been recording floods. For many communities we haven’t even seen the peak of the floodwaters yet, that’s a number of days away.
“Some sections of coastal Queensland received over four feet of rain from September through November,” meteorologist Jeff Masters reports. The floods, which have wiped out crops, drowned livestock, and disrupted the largest coal ports in the world, are expected to cause at least $1 billion in damage.
It’s looking like 2011 will thus continue the disturbing trend of rising disaster from our fossil-fueled climate.
What is your New Year’s resolution?
Energy and global warming news for December 31: A primer on the Federal greenhouse gas regime; Chinese: In 2010, “we experienced extreme weather more often than in any other year in the past decade. And global warming was largely to blame.”
On Eve of New Climate Regs, A Primer on the Federal Greenhouse Gas Regime, Part 1
For 2 years industry officials, states, and environmentalists have had 2 January 2011 circled on their calendars. That’s the date greenhouse gases officially become regulated pollutants under the Clean Air Act””a direct result of a 2007 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that carbon dioxide is a pollutant under that law. The Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to control greenhouse emissions will only get more controversial as myriad lawsuits challenge the regime and Republicans, now ascendant in the House of Representatives, seek to stop EPA in its tracks.
A short primer follows, including some explanation of jargon you’ll no doubt hear regularly in the coming years….
The Physical Chemistry of Carbon Dioxide Absorption
Perhaps because I have been a Physical Chemist for more years than I care to mention, I have the idea that Physical Chemists have something important to contribute to just about any discussion about physical phenomena. I hope that I can convince you that this is in fact true in the case of global climate change.
I’m reposting some Skeptical Science pieces. This one is by Hugo Franzen, a physical chemist.
Read more
WikiLeaks reveals State Department discord over U.S. support for Canadian tar sands oil pipeline
Leaked cable warns of tar sands oil’s ‘higher environmental footprint’ as agency considers pipeline that would double U.S. dependence on it
Alex Moore and Kelly Trout of Friends of the Earth have the story in this repost.
A diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks has revealed that a U.S. diplomat warned the Obama administration about significant environmental impacts stemming from Canada’s controversial tar sands oil production program.
The language in the cable contradicts recent statements by U.S. State Department officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that underplay the environmental impacts of tar sands oil while defending a proposed pipeline that would bring the extremely polluting oil from Canada to the U.S.
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
