For instance, those islands most threatened by rising seas are those that have altered vital natural barriers due to over development:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27639-small-atoll-islands-may-grow-not-sink-as-sea-levels-rise/

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/5/054011

By many accounts, deforestation has had a much larger environmental effect than rising carbon dioxide levels:

http://www.burness.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/WHRC-Science-Update_Embargo_time.pdf

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deforestation-and-global-warming/

Where are all the politicians when it comes to combatting these issues? Perhaps it is due to the lack of government revenue created by the various taxes.

“you know that base load is critical”

I don’t. In fact, I have yet to find anyone able to tell me what the “baseload” of my house is. Why don’t you enlighten me. I am pretty capable with watts and volts and that kind of physics stuff, so don’t be afraid that you will confuse me:

What is the baseload of my house? Just an approximation, based on a typical modest home, would be sufficient.

BPL: I know that “base-load” is a meme fossil-fuel and nuke fans use to claim nuclear and wind can never cut it. Sorry, I disagree.

July 17 – 23, 2016 403.39 ppm 1 Year Ago

July 17 – 23, 2015 400.96 ppm (2.43 ppm in pretty noisy number)

AJ 197: thanks for your thoughts on that. I agree with you, but RL is my go-to guy on heat waves, so have to wait to hear from Ray.

Warm regards,

Mike

“The united states is the most generous country in history to help international causes.”

OT, but possibly this is an indicative statement, so I’ll address it briefly.

That “most generous country” meme is mythology that is persistent and widely believed in the US. However, it is almost certainly not true.

In terms of public funds, it’s definitely not true. The US gives only 0.17% of GDP to Development aid, good for 20th place in the donors’ table; Sweden, the top donor in these terms, does better by a factor of nearly 10, at 1.4%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_country_donors

Private aid is another matter, and one in which the US does better, relatively speaking. However, in 2002 at least, the US was still only #4 in private aid on a per capita basis, behind Norway, Switzerland, and Ireland, respectively:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0930884.html

Bush I did, sort of:

http://what-when-how.com/global-warming/bush-george-h-w-administration-global-warming/

AJ: I wonder when we’ll cross the line to where fossil fuels have cumulatively cost us more in damage than they’ve saved us in low cost? In any case, we’re talking about the future, not the present/past. Some of the comments seem analogous to, “Without spears and bows-and-arrows, you’d never have been born. In fact, the human race might have died off! Thus, we MUST use spears tomorrow!” Dudes, it’s IRRELEVANT whether fossil fuels were productive all the way up to this very moment. Only ten years from now counts. (It will take us ten years to ramp up whatever we do or don’t)

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BPL, the US military decided that a triad was reasonable during the Cold War. Two things can fail, but all three at once is less likely. Of course, four or five is even better, especially when it comes to zero-carbon, since sources aren’t binary. That wind farm might be putting out 25% or 100%. As you have studied electrical supply, you know that “base-load” is critical. And there is only one zero carbon option that is exactly suited for base-load. (Other than special cases, where a natural resource is abundant and constant, such as Niagara Falls.) I won’t talk about n-word building here, but I will say that it’s pure-t-stupid to decommission any reasonably safe n-word power station if there is a fossil fuel power station within the same electrical district. Germany is a good cautionary tale. Decommissioning n-words and ramping up dirty brown coal ate lots and lots of German treasure but didn’t help a whit carbon-wise. They increased their emissions 1% in 2015.
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/03/14/german-co2-emissions-rise-10-million-tonnes-in-2015/

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Mike: It’s just three months of hot weather tacked on to the last 13 or 14 months of hot weather. Is this a big deal?

AJ: YES! The warmer the weather in the US and the more the Arctic sea ice melts, the more votes for sanity in November. Three months is almost exactly the amount of hot and melty weather we need! Hopefully, folks in the northern tier will be voting in shorts…

“Without fossil fuelled energy few of those commenting here would still be alive.”

It is more correct to say that few of those commenting would ever have been born. And then we would have to ask: Why would that be a Bad Thing? (Nothing personal folks.)

We tend to forget that much of what makes life comfortable today was developed with a much much smaller population. Coal certainly helped in speeding up science and technology through the beginning of the 20th century, but at that point, we could have done just fine without petroleum products like gasoline and diesel; electricity and x-rays and antibiotics and computers and so on would still have developed. What we probably wouldn’t have done is triple (? or quadruple?) the population. And even if we were still generating electricity with coal for a population under two billions, we wouldn’t be in this pickle, would we. It would be pretty easy to fix the damage we have done.