Global ALERT: February Hottest in 100 Years - Says #NASA

  HIGHWAY TO GATES OF FIRE

Now you can understand why we don't believe all those politicians and activist who run around promoting phony successes with agreements and more solar cells. Guess What? The climate could care less about our words and aspirations -the FACTS speak for themselves.

February Smashes Earth's All-Time Global Heat Record by a Jaw-Dropping Margin

On Saturday, NASA dropped a bombshell of a climate report. February 2016 has soared past all rivals as the warmest seasonally adjusted month in more than a century of global recordkeeping. NASA’s analysis showed that February ran 1.35°C (2.43°F) above the 1951-1980 global average for the month, as can be seen in the list of monthly anomalies going back to 1880. The previous record was set just last month, as January 2016 came in 1.14°C above the 1951-1980 average for the month. In other words, February has dispensed with this one-month-old record by a full 0.21°C (0.38°F)--an extraordinary margin to beat a monthly world temperature record by. Perhaps even more remarkable is that February 2015 crushed the previous February record--set in 1998 during the peak atmospheric influence of the 1997-98 “super” El Niño that’s comparable in strength to the current one--by a massive 0.47°C (0.85°F).

An ominous milestone in our march toward an ever-warmer planet

Because there is so much land in the Northern Hemisphere, and since land temperatures rise and fall more sharply with the seasons than ocean temperatures, global readings tend to average about 4°C cooler in January and February than they do in July or August. Thus, February is not atop the pack in terms of absolute warmest global temperature: that record was set in July 2015. The real significance of the February record is in its departure from the seasonal norms that people, plants, animals, and the Earth system are accustomed to dealing with at a given time of year. Drawing from NASA’s graph of long-term temperature trends, if we add 0.2°C as a conservative estimate of the amount of human-produced warming that occurred between the late 1800s and 1951-1980, then the February result winds up at 1.55°C above average. If we use 0.4°C as a higher-end estimate, then February sits at 1.75°C above average. Either way, this result is a true shocker, and yet another reminder of the incessant long-term rise in global temperature resulting from human-produced greenhouse gases. Averaged on a yearly basis, global temperatures are now around 1.0°C beyond where they stood in the late 19th century, when industrialization was ramping up. Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University) notes that the human-induced warming is even greater if you reach back to the very start of the Industrial Revolution. Making matters worse, even if we could somehow manage to slash emissions enough to stabilize concentrations of carbon dioxide at their current level, we are still committed to at least 0.5°C of additional atmospheric warming as heat stored in the ocean makes its way into the air, as recently emphasized by Jerry Meehl (National Center for Atmospheric Research). In short, we are now hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of 2.0°C warming over pre-industrial levels.

READ MORE

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/february-smashes-earths-alltime-global-heat-record-by-a-jawdropping





Tokyo was on the brink of nuclear catastrophe

Five years on from the tsunami, the former Japanese prime minister says the country came within a “paper-thin margin” of a nuclear disaster requiring the evacuation of 50 million people. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/12184114/ukushima-Tokyo-was-on-the-brink-of-nuclear-catastrophe-admits-former-prime-minister.html 

Five Years After Fukushima, 'No End in Sight' to Ecological Fallout

These impacts will last "decades to centuries." 

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/03/04/five-years-after-fukushima-no-end-sight-ecological-fallout 

Mutations, DNA damage seen in Fukushima forests

Mutations in trees and DNA-damaged worms were beginning to appear, while "vast stocks of radiation" mean that forests cannot be decontaminated.

http://phys.org/news/2016-03-mutations-dna-fukushima-forests-greenpeace.htm

Archive for ‘Nansen Ice Shelf, Antarctica 2015’

The End of Our Adventure

By Christine Dow

We have arrived back safe and sound after 11 days crossing the Southern Ocean. Our exit from Jang Bogo involved one last (very short) helicopter ride taking us to the Araon icebreaker so that they didn’t have to re-break ice to get back into port. I stayed up till the wee hours on the top deck watching us motoring away from my home for the last month, pushing large chunks of sea ice out the way. Some Adélie penguins were also witness to our departure along with snow and cape petrels diving and swooping around the wave tops. It was a very idyllic sight and I was sad to say goodbye to the Antarctic (until next time).

READ MORE

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/fromthefield/category/nansen-ice-shelf-antarctica-2015/

www.firstfinancialinsights.blogspot.com

Emission Books Were Cooked - Now Where's Al Gore?

"This study should serve as a wake-up call to governments, policymakers, and individuals around the world," said Michalak. "We must expand our focus and devise strategies that target the biogenic emissions of these other greenhouse gases if we are to change the course of climate change."

Greenhouse Gas 'Bookkeeping' Turned on its Head

Washington, D.C.--For the first time scientists have looked at the net balance of the three major greenhouse gases--carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide--for every region of Earth's landmasses. They found surprisingly, that human-induced emissions of methane and nitrous oxide from ecosystems overwhelmingly surpass the ability of the land to soak up carbon dioxide emissions, which makes the terrestrial biosphere a contributor to climate change. The results published in the March 10, 2016, Nature, revises our understanding of how human activity contributes to global warming.

Co-author Anna Michalak of Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology remarked, "Typically we think of land as a net 'sink' of carbon dioxide. But we found that the sign of the human-induced impact is reversed if we also take into account methane and nitrous oxide."

The scientists looked at the so-called biogenic fluxes or flow of the three greenhouse gases on land that were caused by human activities over the last three decades and subtracted out emissions that existed "naturally" during pre-industrial times. Biogenic sources include gas emissions from plants, animals, microbes, and the like. They were interested in finding out how human activities have changed the biogenic fluxes of these gases. Historically, such emissions have included methane emissions from wetlands and nitrous oxide emissions from soil. Human activity and human-caused climate change have changed the magnitude of these fluxes, however, as well as added new categories of biogenic fluxes such as those resulting from sewage, cattle, and fertilizer use.

The scientists first added up all biogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, then subtracted out those that occurred naturally prior to human intervention to get to the net amount. The study did not include non-biogenic gas emissions from activities like fossil fuel burning or natural gas production.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-03/ci-gg030816.php

Leonardo DiCaprio Uses Oscars Speech To Call For Climate Action

“Making The Revenant was about man’s relationship to the natural world, a world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history — our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real, it is happening right now, it is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating.”

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/02/29/3754667/leo-oscars-speech-climate-change/ 

Incredibly Creepy Billboards to Track Behavior of Passers-By

Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, which owns tens of thousands of billboards nationwide, is on Monday announcing plans to use people's cell phones to allow its billboards to track the behavior of everyone who walks or drives past the ads.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/02/29/incredibly-creepy-billboards-track-behavior-passer 

Public ideas leadership on climate? The truth rarely sees the light of day

Propositions that are entirely scientifically valid are rare to non-existent in public discourse in Australia. The idea that more than 1.5C of warming is already locked into the system would be a shock to most participants in public debate

 http://www.climatecodered.org/2016/03/public-ideas-leadership-on-climate.html 

Lower Oil Prices Lead to Higher CO2 Emissions

 If the price of oil decreases, carbon dioxide emissions increase. This is what two Spanish scientists claim after comparing the relationship between air pollution and economic development by using the real oil prices in Spain between 1874 and 2011 as an indicator. The scientists suggest a need to design new energy taxes.

In the 1970s, the first environmental movements warned that air pollution was the result of our production and consumption patterns. At that point in time, economists argued that an improvement in per capita income would reduce the level of environmental degradation -- a relationship called the Environmental Kuznets Curve (with an inverted 'U' shape). Later studies would go on to show that they were right.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-03/f-sf-lop031116.php

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