San Diego's SUSTAINABLE FUTURE: January 2014

Monday, January 20, 2014

Climate Change Deniers - debunked again.

Argument: Humans only partially change the climate, climate change is normal.

A lot of climate change deniers have been posting online that 14,000 years ago the climate was warming and seas were rising faster than today. Which is true. What they don't seem to understand is that due to precession the Earths poles were tilted a couple of degrees further to toward the solar equator, in the opposite direction during aphelion, so seasons were much more sever. Longer winters in the Northern hemisphere kept the Arctic sea frozen year round, and glaciers built up across Europe, Asia, and North America extending down as far as the 42nd parallel latitude (this is the reason the oceans were shallow). The great lakes were glaciers. Yosemite Valley was under glaciers. We were just coming out of a mini ice-age that happens every 26,000 years.

Today we are near the far end of the cycle, and the Earth is as stable and temperate as it's supposed to get, but WE HUMANS ARE DRIVING CLIMATE CHANGE FURTHER and FASTER, and melting the poles even more. Sea levels will rise as fast as they ever do 1-3 meters/100 years. Mountain tops will lose their snow caps, glaciers will melt, large areas will be plagued by drought, and storms will increase in power flooding low lying areas, but the Earth will keep tilting its poles. Thus, in 13,000 years, we may get back to year 2000 temperature levels. By then, many, if not most, of the planet's species will have likely gone extinct, unable to adapt quickly enough given all the stress of living with humans.

Taken together the shifts in Earth orbital eccentricity, axial rotation obliquity, and precession of the pole star, combined with the fact that most of the land mass resides in the Northern hemisphere, and land ice tends to remain longer and reflect the Sun's energy back into space, accounts for the cycles of Ice Ages over the last 600,000 years. It is important to note that these are small shifts in angle and timing, amounting to 3.4-degrees of tilt, and just five-million km (about 2% closer to sun), yet they make dramatic shifts in the planet's surface temperature. Once green-house gasses like carbon, methane, and water vapor are added, the planet becomes Jurassic, with hot shallow seas, and mega storms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession#Axial_precession_.28precession_of_the_equinoxes.29
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Milankovitch/milankovitch_3.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession#Polar_shift_and_equinoxes_shift

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Palau: Ocean Acidification

As Reported by Public Radio International:
Scientists have found a group of corals in the Pacific island nation of Palau that live in water acidic enough to kill most other corals. Now they're hoping what they learn from the unusual reefs may help save others threatened by the increasing acidity of oceans around the world.

Ocean-acidification is real, it is happening globally, and it is caused by human beings. The proof is obvious, if indirect, that the oceans have increased in acidity from 8.2 to 8.1 on the pH-Scale since the beginning of the industrial revolution (pH is a Logarithmic-scale, this 0.1 change = about a 28% increase in acidity over 200 years, source NOAA).

Ocean Acidification Fact Sheet

This report was supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.