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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (934081)	5/9/2016 9:23:11 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571446

It sounds like you want to be an arsonist. Devastation at climate change's Ground Zero Updated: May 9, 2016 — 3:01 AM EDT IF THERE were a place that you could call Ground Zero in the wars over climate change, it might be the Canadian province of Alberta. In the latest chapter in humankind's opioid-like addiction to fossil fuels, energy companies have been extracting dense, dirty oil from that region's deposits of tar sands -- a kind of fuel that is wasteful to extract and emits more carbon pollution when it's finally burned. The added burden of the tar sands oil on our looming global-warming crisis caused U.S. activists to raise a tremendous stink over the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have shipped this dirty fuel right through the American Heartland on its way to Gulf Coast ports and then to foreign markets like China. They raised such a stink, in fact, that President Obama essentially killed the project. Today, the world is talking about northern Alberta - but not for the Keystone XL pipeline. Tragically, the heart of tar sands country - an area roughly the size of New York City - has been battered by wildfires for a hellish week as the worst just now seems to be finally winding down. But thousands may not be able to return home for months. And experts say that conditions for the blaze were created by climate change. Writing this week for the New Yorker, award-winning environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert notes that while the exact cause of the Alberta wildfire is not known, there's little doubt that the region's "unusually dry and warm winter" played a key role, including one recent day in which the mercury hit an astonishing 90 degrees, some 30 degreees higher than normal maximum temperatures for this time of year; snow and other precipitation has been minimal. Reports the New Yorker: "Though it's tough to pin any particular disaster on climate change, in the case of Fort McMurray the link is pretty compelling. In Canada, and also in the United States and much of the rest of the world, higher temperatures have been extending the wildfire season. Last year, wildfires consumed ten million acres in the U.S., which was the largest area of any year on record. All of the top five years occurred in the past decade. In some areas, 'we now have year-round fire seasons,' Matt Jolly, a research ecologist for the United States Forest Service, recently told the Times." The piece by Kolbert also noted that fire seasons are about two-and-half months longer than they were in 1970, while the annual amount of land ravaged by such blazes has doubled in the last three decades and is expected to double again by 2050. Scientists looking back over 10,000 years of records obtained from lake cores were not able to find another period when forest fires were so plentiful or extreme. The only good news to come from this situation is that, miraculously, there has been no loss of life. The devastation of homes and entire neighborhoods, however, is truly heartbreaking. The world is praying for the tireless, remarkable firefighters - and a quick conclusion to the crisis. Hopefully, when the rebuilding is underway, we will also look to the tragedy of Fort McMurray as our wake-up-call that global warming isn't some decades-away thing, dreamed up by a few scientists applying for grants. It's real, it's already here, and it's wreaking havoc among people who deserve better. Here in the United States, in an election year, we need to prod our own candidates - too many of whom, including the "presumptive" nominee of one party, deny or downplay the existence of climate change - to tell us what they're doing to make sure there are no more Fort McMurrays. - Will Bunch philly.com

To: Brumar89 who wrote (934081)	5/9/2016 10:49:32 AM
From: FJB	3 Recommendations Recommended By Brumar89 locogringo TideGlider Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571446

Droughts and fires were worse in the past. Read this, which is a "Review and Update of the 1995 Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy". nifc.gov A screen-shot from the report is below. At CO2 < 300-ppm and the Earth 2F cooler, 145 million acres burned annually, where "fire has been a frequent and major ecological factor in North America." Read the report, you could learn something outside of empty rhetoric.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (934081)	5/9/2016 11:23:12 AM
From: FJB	3 Recommendations Recommended By Brumar89 locogringo TideGlider Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571446

NASA Study Finds 1934 Had Worst Drought of Last Thousand Years "A new study using a reconstruction of North American drought history over the last 1,000 years found that the drought of 1934 was the driest and most widespread of the last millennium. Using a tree-ring-based drought record from the years 1000 to 2005 and modern records, scientists from NASA and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory found the 1934 drought was 30 percent more severe than the runner-up drought (in 1580) and extended across 71.6 percent of western North America. For comparison, the average extent of the 2012 drought was 59.7 percent." nasa.gov Drought in the U.S. is almost non-existent with CO2 and global temps at all-time highs. What does CO2 have to do with droughts? Oh I see, cherry pick a horrible fire in Canada in a region strongly influenced by El Nino.