Environmentally Friendly Blogging Bad News

There's no upside to being right about the state of global warming whilst the deniers are having their way impeding action and legislation of any and all kinds. Yesterday the NYT's got around to covering one of the stories related to the consequences of global warming, of which there are many, that I've been talking about on my radio show for a couple of years and blogging about these last 8 or so months. They should be so proud! The thing is the stories and the peer reviewed science has been out there for all to see. It's no secret and it's the only way I could have known about it as I am neither a scientist nor have I played one on TV. Don't laugh, cable TV news panels are filled with such people.

 The NYT's story is about the threat of rising sea levels as ice and glaciers continue to melt the world over:

As a result of recent calculations that take the changes into account, many scientists now say that sea level is likely to rise perhaps three feet by 2100 — an increase that, should it come to pass, would pose a threat to coastal regions the world over.

 

And the calculations suggest that the rise could conceivably exceed six feet, which would put thousands of square miles of the American coastline under water and would probably displace tens of millions of people in Asia.

It rankles that they still make room for the deniers in their article even though none of their arguments are supported by science. It's hard not to be sickened by such pandering. There is peer-reviewed science and then there are a bunch of assholes and shills braying at shadows. Here's one such caveat: Global warming skeptics, on the other hand, contend that any changes occurring in the ice sheets are probably due to natural climate variability, not to greenhouse gases released by humans. Seriously, who cares what they have to say? They are either working on behalf of the fossil fuel industries or they are ignorant. As far as scientists are concerned, there is no debate. And you'd think that the New York bloody Times could get around to mentioning the amounts of greenhouse gasses being spewed annually amounts to 30 billion tons of CO2. In what universe could such amounts have no effect?

As for those consequences I mentioned? Joe Romm over at Climate Progress has an unhappy list that begins with the science related to global warming being responsible for the 40% decline in the ocean's phytoplankton which are the foundation of the vital marine food web which produces oxygen and serves as a sink for carbon dioxide. This list also includes oceans acidifying at rates ten times faster than 55 million years ago when there was a mass marine extinction event, vast amounts of methane being released from what used to be the permafrost in the cryospheres in Canada and Russia which is a heat-trapping gas 25 times more potent than CO2. Of course all the underlying links that support his arguments are peer-reviewed science from unimpeachable sources that includes Nature, Science, the Royal Society, Nature Geoscience, Met Office and the National Acedemy of Sciences. There's very little room for doubt here and the news is positively devastating.

Moving on to a quick hitter, Science Daily is reporting on a study from University of California, Davis that predicts that at the current pace of research and development, global oil will run out 90 years before replacement technologies are ready. We're not exactly gifted with foresight it seems.