Monbiot.com Inbox x George Monbiot news@monbiot.com via google.com 6:03 PM (5 minutes ago) to me Monbiot.com Elite Insurgency Posted: 14 Oct 2013 12:25 PM PDT The real threat to the national interest comes from the rich and powerful   By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 15th October 2013 Subversion ain’t what it used to be. Today it scarcely figures as a significant force. Nation states are threatened by something else. Superversion: an attack from above. It takes several forms. One is familiar, but greatly enhanced by new technology: the tendency of spooks and politicians to use the instruments of state to amplify undemocratic powers. We’ve now learnt that even members of the Cabinet and the National Security Council had no idea what GCHQ was up to(1). No one told them that it was developing the capacity to watch, if it chooses, everything we do online. The real enemies of state (if by state we mean the compact between citizens and those they elect) are people like the head of MI5, and Theresa May, the Home Secretary, who appears to have failed to inform her Cabinet colleagues. Allied to the old abuses is a newer kind of superversion: the attempts by billionaires and their lieutenants to destroy the functions of the state. Note the current shutdown – and the debt ceiling confrontation scheduled for Thursday – in the United States. The Republicans, propelled by a Tea Party movement created by the Koch brothers and financed by a gruesome collection of multi-millionaires(2,3), have engineered what in other circumstances would be called a general strike. The difference is that the withdrawal of their labour has been imposed on the workers. The narrow purpose of the strike is to prevent the distribution of wealth to poorer people, through the Affordable Care Act. The wider purpose (aside from a refusal to accept the legitimacy of a black president) is to topple the state as an effective instrument of taxation, regulation and social protection. The Koch shock troops in the Republican party seem prepared to inflict almost any damage in pursuit of this insurgency, including – if they hold out on Thursday – a US government default, which could trigger a new global financial crisis(4). They do so on behalf of a class which has, in effect, seceded(5). It floats free of tax and the usual bonds of citizenship, jetting from one jurisdiction to another as it seeks the most favourable havens for its wealth. It removes itself so thoroughly from the life of the nation that it scarcely uses even the roads. Yet, through privatisation and outsourcing, it is capturing the public services on which the rest of us depend. Using an unreformed political funding system to devastating effect(6), this superversive class demands that the state stop regulating, stop protecting, stop intervening. When this abandonment causes financial crisis, the remaining taxpayers are forced to bail out the authors of the disaster, who then stash their bonuses offshore. One result is that those who call themselves conservatives and patriots appear to be deeply confused about what they are defending. In his article last week attacking the Guardian for revealing GCHQ’s secret surveillance programmes, Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, characterised his readers as possessing an “over-riding suspicion of the state and the People Who Know Best.”(7) Strangely, this suspicion of the state and the People Who Know Best does not appear to extend to the security services, whose assault on our freedoms Dacre was defending. To the right-wing press and the Conservative party, patriotism means standing up to the European Union. But it also means capitulating to the United States. It’s an obvious and glaring contradiction, which is almost never acknowledged, let alone explained. In reality the EU and the US have become proxies for something which transcends national boundaries. The EU stands for state control and regulation while the US represents deregulation and atomisation. In reality, this distinction is outdated, as the handful of people who have heard of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will appreciate. The European Commission calls it “the biggest trade deal in the world”(8). Its purpose is to create a single transatlantic market, in which all regulatory differences between the US and the EU are gradually removed. It has been negotiated largely in secret. This time, they’re not just trying to bring down international trade barriers, but, as the commission boasts, “to tackle barriers behind the customs border – such as differences in technical regulations, standards and approval procedures.”(9) In other words, our own laws, affecting our own people. A document published last year by two huge industrial lobby groups – the US Chamber of Commerce and BusinessEurope – explains the partnership’s aims(10). It will have a “proactive requirement”, directing governments to change their laws. The partnership should “put stakeholders at the table with regulators to essentially co-write regulation.” Stakeholder is a euphemism for corporation. They want it; they’re getting it. New intellectual property laws that they have long demanded, but which sovereign governments have so far resisted – not least because of the mass mobilisation against the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act in the US(11) – are back on the table, but this time largely inaccessible to public protest. So are data protection, public procurement and financial services(12). You think that getting your own government to regulate bankers is hard enough? Try appealing to a transnational agreement brokered by corporations and justified by the deemed consent of citizens who have been neither informed nor consulted. This deal is a direct assault on sovereignty and democracy. So where are the Mail and the Telegraph and the other papers which have campaigned so hard against all transfers of power to the European Union? Where are the Conservative MPs who have fought for an EU referendum? Eerie silence descends. They do not oppose the TTIP because their allegiance lies not with the nation but with the offshored corporate elite. These fake patriots proclaim a love for their country, while ensuring that there is nothing left to love. They are loyal to the pageantry – the flags, the coinage, the military parades – but intensely disloyal to the nation these symbols are supposed to represent. The greater the dissonance becomes, the louder the national anthem plays. www.monbiot.com References: 1. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/06/prism-tempora-cabinet-surveillance-state 2. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/25/tea-party-koch-brothers 3. http://www.youtube.com/user/astroturfwars 4. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/opinion/krugman-rebels-without-a-clue.html 5. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/ 6. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/29/capitalism-bankrolls-politics-pay-price 7. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/12/left-daily-mail-paul-dacre 8. http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/in-focus/ttip/ 9. http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/in-focus/ttip/ 10. US Chamber of Commerce and BusinessEurope, October 2012. Regulatory Cooperation in the EU-US Economic Agreement. http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/businesseurope-uschamber-paper.pdf 11. http://www.pcworld.com/article/248298/sopa_and_pipa_just_the_facts.html 12. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/setting-the-terms-for-global-trade-the-transatlantic-trade-and-investment-

Current-tracking drone subs to help improve climate predictions

14 October 2013 | By Stephen Harris

The UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has announced funding for two projects in collaboration with the US to study the circulation of water in the Atlantic that keep Europe’s climate mild and how it could be affected by changing global temperatures.

One of the projects, known as OSNAP, involves mooring monitoring arrays that reach from the bottom to the surface of the ocean at key points across the northern Atlantic, and sending autonomous underwater gliders to gather data from in between.

Dr Sheldon Bacon of the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton University, who is leading the UK team for OSNAP, said this will help them better understand how geographical features of the seabed affect the currents that transfer heat across the Atlantic.

‘If we want models to represent these processes correctly so that we can have betters projection of future climate, if we want to understand regional details like how Britain is likely to be affected in coming decades, we have to understand these features that affect the decadal variability of the ocean,’ he told The Engineer.

The project’s gliders will spend up to four months at a time navigating the ocean currents, following a pre-planned route and surfacing around once a once a week to check its position, correct its course and transmit data back to base.

Each 150cm-long glider uses an external bladder filled and emptied with a reservoir of oil to change the device’s density, in order to sink to around 1km and then rise to the surface. As the glider moves up and down, its wings enable it to move forward at the same time.

The moored arrays will take measurements from the bottom of the ocean that can be used to calculate what happens along the flat part of the seabed. The gliders will navigate the warmer, upper currents in order to study how they are affected by topographical ridges and troughs.

The instruments are due to be deployed next summer and will be changed every one to two years until 2018. ‘These gliders have been around for a number of years but they’re only now becoming mature and reliable enough for long-term missions,’ said Bacon.

Western Europe has a relatively mild climate for a region so far north because of the so-called conveyor belt currents in the Atlantic that bring warm water at the top of the ocean from the tropics northwards.

As the water transfers heat to the atmosphere, it cools, becoming denser and saltier and sinking to the bottom of the ocean – a process known as overturning – where it returns southwards.

Researchers in the other NERC-funded project, known as RAPID, have been studying the conveyor belt between Florida and the Canary Islands using a series of moored arrays for a decade and the programme is now due to run for a further six years.

But in the part of the ocean between Britain and Canada, known as the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre, the process is more complicated due to the wind-driven horizontal circulation of waters on the surface and the more complex seabed topography.

OSNAP (Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program) will enable researchers to study the relationship between the horizontal and vertical currents to build a better understanding of how the water returns to the southern Atlantic rather than just circulating in the north.

‘It turns out you get eddies spinning off at great depths and forming a pathway,’ said Bacon. ‘If we want models to represent these processes correctly so we can have a better projection of future climate, we have to understand these features that affect the decadal variability of the ocean.’

Total funding for the projects is worth £44m, supplied by NERC and the US’s National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Read more: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/rail-and-marine/news/current-tracking-drone-subs-to-help-improve-climate-predictions/1017299.article#ixzz2hlUltwpy

Graph of the Day: Climate science for beginners

Shrink That Footprint

Does it infuriate you when people conflate measurements of carbon and carbon dioxide?  Do you know your ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’ from your ‘transient climate response’? How about the relative importance of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and black carbon in terms of radiative forcing?

No?  Join the club.

Very few people understand the nuts and bolts of climate science beyond the scientists themselves. And that is a real shame, because understanding climate change is important for everyone.

This post is an attempt to explain climate science to beginners.  And when I say beginners I definitely include myself.

Where should you start?

The newly released summary for policy makers from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)  is the best place to read a 20 page summary of what we currently know about climate change. But if you can’t bear the 20 pages of bloodless text, this is a short guide that tries to explain how humans are warming the world. Written for humans.

The world’s atmosphere has warmed about 0.85°C between 1880 and 2012.  The oceans are also warming, absorbing 90% of the increased energy stored in the climate system.  Ice cover in the Artic, Antarctica and Greenland is declining. Sea levels are rising, the ocean is acidifying and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are rising.

These are the ‘fingerprints’ of climate change.  The measurements that show us the world is changing.  The ‘what’ if you will.  Climate science is the effort to explain ‘why’ the world is warming, and what we can expect in the future.  This is what we are going to try and explain here using three ideas:  forcing, sensitivity and pathways.

1: What’s forcing the climate to change?

Climate scientists measure the drivers of climate change using a metric called ‘radiative forcing’.  This quantifies the change in energy fluxes at the top of the atmosphere due to different climate drivers.  Substances with a positive forcing, like carbon dioxide, are those warming the earth. Whereas substances with negative forcing, like sulphate aerosols, are those cooling the earth.

The new IPCC report estimates total human radiative forcing in 2011 relative to 1750 to be 2.29 watts per square metre (W m–2).  The following waterfall chart is an attempt to explain, as simply as possible, what the drivers of climate change are in terms of radiative forcing.

This charts shows the relative importance of different compounds in heating and cooling the earth since 1750.

Emissions of carbon dioxide have been responsible for over half of the warming influences to date. Methane, carbon monoxide, halo-carbons and nitrous oxide also have a significant warming influence.  The major cooling influences are NOx gases, aerosols (like sulphates and organic carbon) and changes in land albedo (how shiny it is).  The effect aerosols have on clouds also has a large cooling effect, though there is significant uncertainty in quantifying this.

To keep this graphic as digestible as possible I have limited it to primary emitted compounds and point estimates for each forcing.  The complete picture is much more nuanced and includes the varying levels of certainty, confidence intervals, drivers that result from each compound and differing atmospheric residences.  You can read all that fun stuff in the summary for policymakers.

2: How sensitive is the climate?

Now that we have an idea of what is driving climate change, it is time to discuss how much these ‘forcings’ will change the earth’s surface temperature.  For that we’ll have to drop the S-bomb: ‘sensitivity’.

Sensitivity is how much we expect the world to warm for a given forcing, often defined as a doubling of atmospheric CO2 (4 W m–2).  Using a mix of paleoclimate data, observations and computer models climate scientists estimate how sensitive the climate is to a given climate forcing.

If you ever find yourself discussing climate sensitivity in a pub, be sure to define it before you get too many drinks in.  Because you don’t want to confuse transient climate response (decades), with  equilibrium climate sensitivity (centuries) and earth system sensitivity (millennia).

To keep this explanation simple, we’ll just look at two types of sensitivity, equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and transient climate response (TCR).

Equilibrium climate sensitivity is how much we would expect the world to warm if we doubled atmospheric CO2 and waited a few hundred years for the climate reach a new equilibrium.  The IPCC’s latest estimate is:

likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C

Transient climate response is the temperature we expect at the time carbon dioxide concentrations have doubled if they increase at 1% per year. The IPCC says it is:

likely in the range of 1.0°C to 2.5°C

If you are interested in looking at what is happening over the coming decades then TCR is more relevant.  Whereas for discussions about climate stabilization targets ECS is the preferred metric.

A major reason for the difference between these two values is the slow speed with which heat absorbed by the oceans is eventually released to warm the atmosphere. The uncertainty for each involves things like the ocean mixing of heat, differences between surface and atmospheric warming, water vapor and cloud formation feedbacks.

For any estimate of climate sensitivity it is crucial to understand the time frame and which feedbacks are included.

3: Which pathway will we choose?

The world is going to warm this century, considerably.  That is what the science tells us.  But just how much it is going to warm is uncertain due to a number of things.

These uncertainties include the future path of emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols,  land and ocean sink function, ocean heat mixing and the extent of various feedbacks.

To give us an idea of what to expect this century the IPCC’s fifth assessment report uses what they called representative concentration pathways (RCP).  Each of the four RCPs are named after their approximate total radiative forcing  (W m–2) in 2100 relative to 1750.  The four RCPs are 2.6, 4.0, 6.5 and 8.5 W m–2.  Each of which are higher than the 2011 estimate of 2.29 W m–2 we saw earlier.

In simple terms these pathways range from rapid mitigation (RCP 2.6) to runaway emissions (RCP 8.5).  Bringing together a wide ensemble of climate models that involve different forcing and sensitivity estimates the IPCC has given us an idea of how much it thinks the world could warm this century for each pathway.

For the rapid mitigation pathway (RCP 2.6) the expected warming this century is 1.0°C (the likely range is shown in the bars).

For the fast stabilization pathway (RCP 4.5) they expect 1.8°C of warming.

For the slower stabilization pathway (RCP 4.5) the mean estimate is 2.2°C.

And for the runaway emissions scenario (RCP 8.5) it is  3.7°C.

This warming is on top of the 0.6°C observed up to the 1986-2005 reference period, so in every case but the rapid mitigation scenario (RCP 2.6) the temperature is expected to warm beyond 2°C above the pre-industrial period.  It is also worth remembering these are surface averages, so areas over land and northern latitudes would likely fare far worse (See figure SPM.8).

So there you have it.  Climate science works out what is ‘forcing’ the climate to change.  Estimates how ‘sensitive’ the climate is to those changes.  And models how much warming might occur under different emissions ‘pathways’.

Clear as mud? Time for that drink.

 

131011 Speech to the Fenner Conference.pdf 29K   View   Download

 

Last month I wrote two articles (here, here), gave an interview to The Real News Network (here), and an interview to Uprising Radio (here) about the devastating floods in Colorado. With Boulder as its epicenter, the floods damaged more than 2,000 squares miles along the Colorado Front Range–from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins. Ten people were killed, nearly 18,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, hundreds of miles of road were washed out, and thousands of oil and gas wells flooded resulting in environmental contamination from toxic fracking fluids and nearly 40,000 gallons of spilled oil. Boulder got nearly its annual average rainfall in just five days, and it happened at a wrong time–September, not July/August, when rain usually falls in the desert southwest.

My main contribution was to raise the noise level that the corporate media had failed miserably in its reporting of the Colorado floods. Not a single journalist had raised the question on corporate TV: Did global warming play a part in causing or intensifying the Colorado floods?

Bamboozled by the lure of technology, humans have become deeply amnesic. We forget a tragedy soon after the corporate media stops reporting on a particular catastrophe. In a globally warmed Earth, however, before amnesia sets in, the next assault arrives.

This morning I woke up to the news of super cyclone Phailin in the Bay of Bengal that will make landfall tomorrow in the east coast of India. “Odisha and Andhra Pradesh braced for the “very severe” cyclone that is expected to hit the east coast with winds gusting up to 220 kmph [136 mph] tomorrow evening, as lakhs [1 lakh=100,000] of people were being evacuated to safer places and the military kept on standby,” The Hindu reports.

I had lived in the American southwest for eleven years, and I was born and grew up in Bengal. So, the recent Colorado floods and the super cyclone in the Bay of Bengal are personal.

There are already many news articles on the India cyclone that you can read: The Hindu here, Times of India here, India Today here, BBC here, Washington Post here. I won’t go into the details; instead, I’ll focus on bringing attention to two things: naming and blaming.

Apparently Phailin was named by Thailand and it means sapphire in Thai. What nonsense. Some humans do desire the precious stone, but no one, I’d think, is desiring Phailin. India should rename this meaningless obfuscation and call attention to global warming immediately.

There was also some confusion about whether this is a ‘cyclone’ or a ‘super cyclone’. On Thursday the India Meteorological Department had “indicated that the wind speed would be limited to 185 kmph.” But now the forecast is at 220 kmph, and the US Navy has indicated that the “wind speed will be above 240 kmph.” So before the cyclone makes a landfall, it will turn into a deadly super cyclone–yet another example of extreme weather event.

The India Today has posted a very useful article “What is a super cyclone?” The article gives an excellent explanation of the 1999 Odisha super cyclone, also known as Cyclone 05B. “It struck the coast of Odisha with a height of [ocean water] 26 feet (8 meters). Approximately 275,000 homes were destroyed leaving 1.67 million people homeless. Another 19.5 million people were affected by the super cyclone to some degree. A total of 9,803 people officially died from the storm. Though it is believed that 15,000 people died,” the India Today reports. The article also mentions how the rescue operation proceeded. By placing this article in the context of the impending super cyclone in the exact same landscape, journalists in India are doing a better job than how the Colorado floods were reported last month. But it could be better, it needs to better, and make an explicit connection to global warming.

India Today explained: “Tropical cyclones typically form over large bodies of relatively warm water. They derive their energy from the evaporation of water from the ocean surface, which ultimately recondenses into clouds and rain when moist air rises and cools to saturation.” There is our clue–connection of the impending super cyclone with global warming. All the articles I have come across on the impending Bay of Bengal cyclone, however, avoided using the phrase–global warming.

The anthropogenic global warming caused by accumulation of greenhouse gases is making the oceans warmer, which in turn is causing more frequent and more intense cyclones/hurricanes and floods.

The UN IPCC Fifth Assessment Report’s (AR5) first part, the Summary for Policymakers (SPM), was released two weeks ago. More than a 1,000 scientists from all over the world contributed to the report, and the team worked for six years. The SPM was approved by 190 nations. All that means that the IPCC AR5 is a conservative estimate of global warming. The reality will likely be worse than what the IPCC is saying.

Having said all that, the IPCC reports states: “Ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010 (high confidence). It is virtually certain that the upper ocean (0−700 m) warmed from 1971 to 2010…”

India-based Dr. Rajendra Pachauri has been, since 2002, the chairperson of IPCC, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. I’d urge Dr. Pachauri to go on TV and explain the anthropogenic warming of oceans and its relevance to the impending super cyclone in the Bay of Bengal that will undoubtedly bring massive deaths–humans and nonhuman species–and devastation.

India must rename Phailin and connect the impending super cyclone to global warming.

Subhankar Banerjee’s most recent book Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point will be published in paperback on October 22, 2013 (Seven Stories Press).

Northern China is running out of water, but the government’s remedies are potentially disastrous