Quote of the day comes from Tove Maria Ryding, of Greenpeace, talking about the depressingly futile latest round of climate talks in Bonn.

"It's absurd to watch governments sit and point fingers and fight like little kids while the scientists explain about the terrifying impacts of climate change."

More here.

From IPS:

The results from 19 different state-of-the-art climate models project extreme and persistent drought conditions (colored dark red-brown on the maps) for almost all of Mexico, the midwestern United States and most of Central America.

If climate change pushes the global average temperature to 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial era levels, as many experts now expect, these regions will be under severe and permanent drought conditions.

Future conditions are projected to be worse than Mexico's current drought or the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s that forced hundreds of thousands of people to migrate.

These are some of the conclusions of the study "Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico", which was published in the December 2011 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Hydrometeorology and has gone largely unnoticed.

"Drought conditions will prevail no matter what precipitation rates are in the future," said co-author Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. government research centre in California.

...The 19 models used in the study show that the increased heat will dry soils more than any additional rain can replenish soil moisture levels. Ever warmer air temperatures will cause greater evaporation, drying out soils.

I know I've written about this before, but I'm going to keep repeating the message because this is the biggest danger of climate change to Americans, who need to realise this is coming. American-produced apathy and denialism is one of the biggest drags on world-wide climate change opinion, and thus on action. Maybe this, a disaster for the bulk of America's heartland, will convince Americans to get their collective heads out of their asses.

That's the pretty interesting, if simplistic, question posed by The Atlantic:

Not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of radical life extension. As funding for anti-aging research has exploded, bioethicists have expressed alarm, reasoning that extreme longevity could have disastrous social effects. Some argue that longer life spans will mean stiffer competition for resources, or a wider gap between rich and poor. Others insist that the aging process is important because it gives death a kind of time release effect, which eases us into accepting it. These concerns are well founded. Life spans of several hundred years are bound to be socially disruptive in one way or another; if we're headed in that direction, it's best to start teasing out the difficulties now.

Montpelier, VT | May 17

CNN - Vermont's governor has signed a bill making it the first U.S. state to ban fracking, the controversial practice to extract natural gas from the ground.

"This is a big deal," Gov. Peter Shumlin said Wednesday. "This bill will ensure that we do not inject chemicals into groundwater in a desperate pursuit for energy."

Shumlin said fracking contaminates groundwater and the science behind it is "uncertain at best." He said he hopes other states will follow Vermont's lead in banning it.

ProPublica, By Abrahm Lustgarten, May 1

A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted.

More than 5,000 wells were drilled in the Marcellus between mid-2009 and mid-2010, according to the study, which was published in the journal Ground Water two weeks ago. Operators inject up to 4 million gallons of fluid, under more than 10,000 pounds of pressure, to drill and frack each well.

Chuck Hagel pens an oped on "The Challenge Of Change" for the US:

The great challenges facing the world today are the responsibility of all peoples of the world. They include cyber warfare, terrorism, preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts, prosperity and stability, and global poverty, disease and environmental degradation."

I'm assuming that "environmental degradation" doesn't just mean pollution but is code for global warming/climate change in case Republicans reading get upset by the actual words*.

It's one thing to ignore an elephant, it's entirely another to avoid a tornado.

* At least I hope so, because the alternative - that the Chair of the Atlantic Council and co-Chair of Obama's Intelligence Advisory Board has written such a piece without mentioning climate change at all - is just too horrible a possibility to contemplate.

Stacey Leasca | Hong Kong | May 15

Global Post - Humans are using a planet and a half worth of natural resources.

Humans are using a planet and a half worth of natural resources, according to the World Wildlife Fund's annual Living Planet report.

The report said, "During the 1970s, humanity as a whole passed the point at which the annual Ecological Footprint matched the Earth’s annual biocapacity. This situation is called “ecological overshoot”, and has continued since then. An overshoot of 50 percent means it would take 1.5 years for the Earth to regenerate the renewable resources that people used in 2007 and absorb CO2 waste."

The first big wildfires of the season in Arizona have struck.

Hundreds of firefighters battled several Arizona wildfires on Monday that charred more than 7,000 acres of parched Ponderosa forest, brush and grassland over the weekend, consuming half a dozen buildings and threatening a small town, authorities said.

The Sunflower Fire, the largest of at least four blazes in central and eastern Arizona, burned 3,100 acres in the Tonto National Forest, about 40 miles north of Phoenix, destroying two homes, a business and two outbuildings over the weekend, the Southwest Coordination Center said.

About 350 residents in the nearby community of Crown King were under mandatory evacuation on Monday after the human-caused Gladiator Fire burned 3,000 acres of ponderosa pine, brush and chaparral in the Prescott National Forest and destroyed three buildings.

With over half of the US still in a state of drought, the weather forcasts are "not optimistic".

Quite a few rightwing commentators are making waves today about a Government Accountability Office statement which says (PDF) that:

The Green River
Formation—an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming—contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale. USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions. The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered. At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.

There reactions are all along the same lines: this shale-oil reserve could "by itself supply domestic oil consumption for more than 200 years", and "will Obama, in a possible second term, block the development of the resources that can assure America’s economic supremacy for generations?"

Typically simplistic. If only it were that easy.

350.org organized "Connect the Dots" on Saturday May 5, 2012. People all over the world generated local events to connect the dots between climate change and extreme weather. Droughts, floods, hurricanes, seasonal change, etc. are a function of accelerating and damaging climate change.

Charles Manson or Osama bin Laden? Nothing at all, suggests the (tobacco, oil and motor industry funded) denialist Heartland Institute in a new set of billboard ads in the Chicago area. No, seriously.

The resident denialist nutter at The UK's leading newspaper for old paleoconservative duffers and young neocon crazies, The Dully Torygraph, complains that "greens" (when not capitalized and thus referring to the political party, always intended by the Torygraph as a euphemism for "Dirty Fucking Hippies") did it first and asks:

judging by today's fracas, where it is okay to compare climate-change sceptics to mass murderers, it is not okay to compare greens to mass murderers. Is that right?

Yes, it is. Because denialism will actually cause the deaths of millions.

Update GOP Rep. Sensenbrenner is the first to pull out of Heartland's up-coming climate denial conference over the billboards.

Wendy Koch | May 4

USA TODAY - As oil and gas drilling explodes nationwide, the Obama administration today proposed rules requiring the disclosure of chemicals used to extract these deposits on public and Indian lands. Environmentalists say the rules don't go far enough but an industry group says they may stifle job growth with "bureaucratic red tape."

The proposed rules require companies to disclose the chemicals used during hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, but do so after (not before) they finish operations. About 90% of wells drilled on federal and Indian lands use this drilling process, which blasts chemical-laced water and sand deep below ground to release oil and natural gas trapped in rock formations.

ouuu scary,could hurt job growth.

WaPo

TransCanada expected to reapply for Keystone pipeline permit as soon as Friday

“With Nebraska now on board and the application being re-filed, the president has lost his always-flimsy excuse for blocking this job-creating project,” the statement said. “With energy security at stake and jobs on the line, and he should listen to the American people, not just his political base, and approve it immediately.”(Boehner)

“The fundamental facts remain; Americans are being asked to put clean water at risk for an extreme form of energy that will add nothing to our energy security,” Kleeb wrote in an e-mail. “We are subsidizing this extreme form of energy to boot with over 1 billion of our tax payer dollars used to retrofit a Saudi-owned refinery for their tarsands headed straight to the export market. A transparent process will show TransCanada’s risky pipeline is not in our national interest.”

Rob Edwards | May 2

The Guardian - Hundreds of sites across England and Wales could be contaminated with radioactive waste from old military bases and factories, according to a new government report.

Up to 1,000 sites could be polluted, though the best guess is that between 150 and 250 are, says a report on contaminated land by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), released last month, but previously unreported.

This is far higher than previous official estimates, with evidence from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) last December suggesting that there were just 15 sites in the UK contaminated with radium from old planes and other equipment.

Scientists shocked to find greenhouse gas 70 times more potent than CO2 bubbling from deep ocean

A new source of methane – a greenhouse gas many times more powerful than carbon dioxide – has been identified by scientists flying over areas in the Arctic where the sea ice has melted.

The researchers found significant amounts of methane being released from the ocean into the atmosphere through cracks in the melting sea ice. They said the quantities could be large enough to affect the global climate. Previous observations have pointed to large methane plumes being released from the seabed in the relatively shallow sea off the northern coast of Siberia but the latest findings were made far away from land in the deep, open ocean where the surface is usually capped by ice.

Eric Kort of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that he and his colleagues were surprised to see methane levels rise so dramatically each time their research aircraft flew over cracks in the sea ice.

"When we flew over completely solid sea ice, we didn't see anything in terms of methane. But when we flew over areas were the sea ice had melted, or where there were cracks in the ice, we saw the methane levels increase," Dr Kort said. "We were surprised to see these enhanced methane levels at these high latitudes. Our observations really point to the ocean surface as the source, which was not what we had expected," he said.

"Other scientists had seen high concentrations of methane in the sea surface but nobody had expected to see it being released into the atmosphere in this way," he added.

Link Fixed: Click here to see 'The deadly depths - Methane release in the Arctic' graphic

Read more from Steve Connor at The Independent

A new survey shows that while Republican congresscritters, presidential candidates and media mouthpieces have all hewn to the GOP's climate denialism purity test, even the Republican rank-and-file have been moving in exactly the other direction. CS Monitor reports:

Three out of four U.S. voters favor regulating carbon dioxide as a greenhouse-gas pollutant, and a majority think global warming should be a priority for the president and Congress, a survey of American attitudes on climate and energy reported on Thursday.

The survey was released one day after Rolling Stone magazine published an interview with President Barack Obama in which he suggested that climate change would become a campaign issue this year.

In results often at odds with the political debate in Washington, the survey conducted for Yale and George Mason University also found most Americans would vote for a candidate who raised taxes on coal, oil and natural gas - fossil fuels that emit climate-warming carbon dioxide when burned - while cutting income tax, in a revenue-neutral "tax swap."

Imagine if we lived in a world where a US Republican Secretary of State could take to the op-ed pages, as UK Foreign Minister and conservative William Hague just has, to tell it like it is:

We are at the start of a global shift from a high- to a low-carbon economy. The shift will be driven by those countries that transform their own economies so as to better compete in rapidly expanding global markets.

...We have left behind an era in which energy, food, water, and other resources have been relatively cheap and plentiful. Rising demand is carrying us into an age of higher and more volatile prices for energy, food and raw materials. Political tensions in the regions traditionally supplying the world's oil have added to the uncertainties. Climate change is amplifying these stresses, and will do so increasingly.

These risks post a serious threat to growth, through price shocks and inflation. Their political consequences could be more serious still, with some tempted to see a zero sum competition for resources between consumers and between nations. That would be an historic mistake, triggering a spiral away from the cooperation based on agreed rules that is vital for a globally exposed economy like our own, towards a much more dangerous world of fragmentation, competition and greatly enhanced risks of conflict.

A core goal of British foreign policy must be to defend the open global economy against this threat. That will require a rapid global shift towards enhanced resource productivity and energy efficiency, and lower carbon intensity. Encouraging this transition, not least working through the strengthened bilateral partnerships that we have been building especially with the emerging economies, is a top priority for our diplomatic network.

Today the International Energy Authority's executive director, Maria van der Hoeven, warned that the world is barrelling towards catastrophic 6C warming by the end of the century. In a world where a Republican SecState could talk like William Hague there'd be hope that bipartisan consensus in the world's richest and most powerful nation might offer leadership to avert that disaster. Instead, the GOP has decided to shill for energy lobby campaign donations and play up the politics of denial and divisiveness for their own short-term gains and thus moved the Overton Window of US debate so that their Democratic party opponents are afraid to speak up as clearly and urgently as they should too.

Just in time for earth day. Another post that shows how our totalitarian agriculture gives us the peace of mind that we're doing the right thing while destroying our planet. Just wait until I get to GMO... that's when things get REALLY nasty.

One thing I just recalled as I was reading through responses is that when I say intensive agriculture it doesn’t sound right to some folks. I agree and I think I’ll adopt the phrase totalitarian agriculture which Quinn uses. Also henceforth when I use the term savage I’ll be referring to somebody or a group that does not practice totalitarian agriculture.

It must be an election year, with the incumbent up against a denialist party who might say nasty things while simultaneously trying to pander to corporate campaign donors.

Can the Democratic Party just go change its name to the Spellunking Party, please?

If something isn’t true but we believe it is, then it boils down to lack of knowledge. It could be we simply don’t have the appropriate knowledge required to correctly perceive it or that illusions are preventing us from recognizing the truth. It seems a bit confusing to say this, but not recognizing the illusion is in itself a lack of knowledge. If we know the illusion exists and we have the cognitive ability to overcome it, then we can correctly perceive the original fallacy that we believed was truth.

Any number of optical illusions show two objects of identical size and create a way to alter our perception so that we think they are not the same size. One object really looks bigger than the other. Of course, the solution when somebody asks which is bigger is that we take out a ruler and measure. The ruler shows that they are in fact the same size. I’m sure you’ve seen it but just in case http://www.coolopticalillusions.com/eye-tricks/which-arch-is-bigger.htm

Gethin Chamberlain | Apr 21

The Observer - Logging companies keen to exploit Brazil's rainforest have been accused by human rights organisations of using gunmen to wipe out the Awá, a tribe of just 355. Survival International, with backing from Colin Firth, is campaigning to stop what a judge referred to as 'genocide'

The story of the seed was a foundation. It was meant to reveal a bit about nature. In nature things serve their purpose and would never deviate from it. What allows nature to work, which I believe works without question, is that each thing serves its purpose and follows the law of nature. What occurs to me as I think back through a number of portions of the Tao Te Ching is that even when that text was written some 2,500 or so years ago somebody realized something just wasn’t right. Perhaps at the time they didn’t have the understanding of biology and ecology to see what was happening to the world around them. There are plenty that, with exponentially more knowledge than we had even 200 years ago, still don’t see what’s happening to the world around them.

Apr 20

CSM - The late Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D) of Wisconsin organized the first Earth Day in 1970 after the devastating oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. The event started as an environmental teach-in, with some 20 million Americans taking part on college campuses across the United States. Today, 500 million people in 175 countries observe Earth Day on April 22 as a way to celebrate the natural world and raise awareness of the environment. How much do humans affect the earth?

I was seven years old living at the Great Lakes Naval Base when I participated in the first Earth Day activities, and been happily labeled a enviromentalist ever since. Where were you?

Blamed for Bee Collapse, Monsanto Buys Leading Bee Research Firm