Well, Dave, it looks like peo­ple are finally begin­ning to wake up to the com­pro­mi­sa­tion of the Tea Party, and every other thing the glob­al­ists have done as well...........and of course, we have peo­ple like you to thank for telling the truth AS IT IS. =)

It’s kind of scary how often the ques­tion can be asked of our elites “Are you actively try­ing to destroy the planet, or do you just not care?”:

Case closed: “Cli­mate­gate” was manufactured

It’s not often you can actu­ally say “case closed”, but in this case it’s lit­er­ally true: cli­ma­tol­o­gist Michael Mann has been cleared of all wrong­do­ing by the Inspec­tor Gen­eral of the National Sci­ence Foundation.

Did I say “has been cleared”? I meant has been cleared once again, since there have been sev­eral inves­ti­ga­tions into his research and Dr. Mann has been cleared of all charges every sin­gle time (like here and here). All of this stemmed from the “Cli­mate­Gate” non­sense of the past cou­ple of years, where leaked emails were taken hugely out of con­text by the press and cli­mate change deniers, and used to smear sci­en­tists. Dr. Mann was at the cen­ter of the whole man­u­fac­tured con­tro­versy, being the biggest tar­get of the peo­ple who want to deny the Earth is warm­ing up.
...

Of course, try­ing to destroy the bios­phere is never quite as scary as actu­ally doing it:

Euro­pean Com­mis­sion apol­o­gises for dis­as­trous fish­ing policy

The Euro­pean Com­mis­sion has apol­o­gised for decades of an EU fish­ing pol­icy so dis­as­trous that the next gen­er­a­tion of chil­dren may never see fish on their din­ner plate.

By Bruno Water­field, Brussels

9:30PM BST 13 Jul 2011

Maria Damanaki, the EU’s mar­itime com­mis­sioner, admit­ted that Europe’s Com­mon Fish­ing Pol­icy (CFP) had failed and cre­ated a “vicious cir­cle” where over­fish­ing was endan­ger­ing fish species.

Pledg­ing to scrap an EU quo­tas sys­tem that forces fish­er­men to throw away or “dis­card” up to 80 per cent of their catch, Mrs Damanaki apol­o­gised for a pol­icy that has pushed Europe’s fish stocks to the brink of extinction.

“I have no prob­lem to apol­o­gise if some­thing is wrong,” she said.

“We can­not afford busi­ness as usual. Maybe 10 years ago, the past, it was eas­ier for us, in the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, in gov­ern­ments, in the sec­tor, to close our eyes. We can­not do that any­more because if we do our chil­dren will see fish, not on their plates, but only in pic­tures.”

“If it’s busi­ness as usual, in 10 years only eight out of 136 stocks will be healthy.”

...

Well, at least once the ice caps melt and the sea lev­els rise the fish­ing indus­try will have a few more square miles of open water to over­fish the remain­ing species. That should help the economy.

Med­ical reports are indi­cat­ing that grow­ing num­bers of Amer­i­cans are suf­fer­ing from Ran­di­tis as the eco­nomic trou­bles con­tinue. Symp­toms include an array of cog­ni­tive impair­ments affect­ing mem­ory and rea­son­ing. It’s a trou­bling report.

I’m sure our lead­ers would like us to know that this is noth­ing to worry about, but its worth not­ing that researchers are find­ing changes in ocean acid­ity asso­ci­ated with past mass extinc­tion events:

ars tech­nica
Ocean acid­i­fi­ca­tion on track to be among the worst of the last 300 mil­lion years
By Scott K. John­son
3/1/2012

Some like to point to cycles when dis­miss­ing cli­mate change, brush­ing off warm­ing as sim­ply being the thing that hap­pens right before cool­ing. In this view, con­cern about cli­mate change is akin to the naïve worry that half of schools are per­form­ing below aver­age. This is why we need con­text. We need to know whether an observed change is more like a world pre­miere or a famil­iar re-run.

A new paper in Sci­ence exam­ines the geo­logic record for con­text relat­ing to ocean acid­i­fi­ca­tion, a low­er­ing of the pH dri­ven by the increased con­cen­tra­tion of car­bon diox­ide in the atmos­phere. The research group (twenty-one sci­en­tists from nearly as many dif­fer­ent uni­ver­si­ties) reviewed the evi­dence from past known or sus­pected inter­vals of ocean acid­i­fi­ca­tion. The work pro­vides per­spec­tive on the cur­rent trend as well as the poten­tial con­se­quences. They find that the cur­rent rate of ocean acid­i­fi­ca­tion puts us on a track that, if con­tin­ued, would likely be unprece­dented in last 300 mil­lion years.

There are sev­eral ways acid­i­fi­ca­tion events leave their sig­na­ture in the rock record. The iso­topic com­po­si­tion of car­bon changes with shifts in the car­bon cycle, such as the move­ment of green­house gases like methane and car­bon diox­ide in the atmos­phere. Iso­topes of boron present in marine shells track ocean water pH. The ratios of other trace ele­ments in marine shells (such as ura­nium or zinc) to cal­cium indi­cate the avail­abil­ity of car­bon­ate ions. (Ocean acid­i­fi­ca­tion is not just about pH, but the reduc­tion of car­bon­ate min­eral sat­u­ra­tion that makes it more dif­fi­cult for cal­ci­fiers to build their shells.) In addi­tion to all this, the fos­sil record records the extinc­tions and mor­pho­log­i­cal changes in marine species that occur around cat­a­strophic events in Earth his­tory.
Recon­struct­ing the past

The paper cov­ers the last 300 mil­lion years. That’s not just a round number—it’s about as far back as we can con­fi­dently go. Because plate tec­ton­ics dri­ves oceanic plates back down into the man­tle at sub­duc­tion zones, there is no oceanic crust or sed­i­ment older than 180 mil­lion years for us to examine.

...

The first period the researchers looked at was the end of the last ice age, start­ing around 18,000 years ago. Over a period of about 6,000 years, atmos­pheric CO2 lev­els increased by 30 per­cent, a change of roughly 75 ppm. (For ref­er­ence, atmos­pheric CO2 has gone up by about the same amount over the past 50 years.) Over that 6,000 year time period, sur­face ocean pH dropped by approx­i­mately 0.15 units. That comes out to about 0.002 units per cen­tury. Our cur­rent rate is over 0.1 units per century—two orders of mag­ni­tude greater, which lines up well with a model esti­mate we cov­ered recently.

The last deglacia­tion did not trig­ger a mass extinc­tion, but it did cause changes in some species. The shells of plank­tic foram­in­fera decreased by 40–50 per­cent, while those of coc­col­ithophores went down 25 percent.

Dur­ing the Pliocene warm period, about 3 mil­lion years ago, atmos­pheric CO2 was about the same as today, but pH was only 0.06 to 0.11 units lower than prein­dus­trial con­di­tions. This is because the event played out over 320,000 years or so. We see species migra­tion in the fos­sil record in response to the warm­ing planet, but not ill effects on cal­ci­fiers. This is because ocean acid­i­fi­ca­tion depends pri­mar­ily on the rate of atmos­pheric CO2 increases, not the absolute concentration.

Next, the researchers turned their focus to the Paleocene-Eocene Ther­mal Max­i­mum (or PETM), which occurred 56 mil­lion years ago. Global tem­per­a­ture increased about 6°C over 20,000 years due to an abrupt release of car­bon to the atmos­phere (though this was not as abrupt as cur­rent emis­sions). The PETM saw the largest extinc­tion of deep-sea foraminifera of the last 75 mil­lion years, and was one of the four biggest coral reef dis­as­ters of the last 300 mil­lion years.

...

Finally, we come the big one—The Great Dying. The Permian-Triassic mass extinc­tion (about 252 mil­lion years ago) wiped out around 96 per­cent of marine species. Still, the rate of CO2 released to the atmos­phere that drove the dan­ger­ous cli­mate change was 10–100 times slower than cur­rent emis­sions.

Match­ing the mod­ern to history

...

The authors con­clude, “[T]he cur­rent rate of (mainly fos­sil fuel) CO2 release stands out as capa­ble of dri­ving a com­bi­na­tion and mag­ni­tude of ocean geo­chem­i­cal changes poten­tially unpar­al­leled in at least the last ~300 [mil­lion years] of Earth his­tory, rais­ing the pos­si­bil­ity that we are enter­ing an unknown ter­ri­tory of marine ecosys­tem change.”

But but but I was told that CO2 is Life!

Ignor­ing climate-change: what could pos­si­bly go wrong?

Well this is interesting...if humanity’s appar­ent inabil­ity to address cli­mate change might leave you with a gen­eral sense that “the sky is falling”, it’s worth not­ing that new research sug­gests has some news for you: increas­ing atmos­pheric CO2 lev­els are thin­ning out and shrink­ing the upper atmos­phere. So yes, the sky is actu­ally falling. But it’s not all bad...since the atmos­phere is now shrink­ing there’s less drag on orbit­ing satel­lites so fewer of them will fall to the earth and burn up in the atmos­phere. Ok, that actu­ally is bad, but still kind of cool because it means that we’ve man­aged to cre­ate the kind of calamity that will cause the sky to fall while simul­ta­ne­ously caus­ing less stuff to fall into it. That’s almost impressive.

Yep, our goose may be cooked, but at least we’re cook­ing with gusto. Go Team Human­ity!

Awww, see, cli­mate change can be beau­ti­ful:

National Geo­graphic
Ear­li­est Blooms Recorded in U.S. Due to Global Warm­ing
Plants still able to cope with ris­ing tem­per­a­tures, study finds.

Chris­tine Dell’Amore

Pub­lished Jan­u­ary 16, 2013

You could call them early bloomers: In 2010 and 2012, plants in the east­ern U.S. pro­duced flow­ers ear­lier than at any point in recorded his­tory, a new study says.

This result, accord­ing to the research team, has a bit of a lit­er­ary twist: It comes from data col­lected by U.S. envi­ron­men­tal writ­ers Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold. Thoreau began observ­ing bloom times in Mass­a­chu­setts in 1852, and Leopold began in Wis­con­sin in 1935.

...

Many stud­ies have already shown that flow­er­ing times have come ear­lier as a result of recent global warm­ing, but what’s unknown is how long the plants will be able to “keep up” by bud­ding ear­lier and ear­lier. (Get more facts about spring.)

So far, plants—at least in the east­ern U.S.—are coping.

...

More soot please! Actu­ally, maybe that’s a bad idea.