Unsustainable Exponentiation Of Temperature

ANTHROPOCENE DETERIORATING CLIMATE: CO2, GHG, Questions And Answers:

Nigel: Based on your posts I have great admiration for your depth of research and the quest for truth so I implore you to let me brief you on this climate change subject some more..

PA: Thanks, I appreciate the compliment a lot, and it encourages me to persist in my ways, whatever they are. On all subjects, I try to get all perspectives, keep what I perceive to be right, what is false, and then rebuild a logic around those truths. My positions on everything, including climate, often lead people to label me in ways far removed from, or even opposite to, my balance point. On the human caused climate change, my positions are nuanced and wildly diverse, yet they make a coherent whole. Yes, we are on an eminent +7C trajectory. Should we panic and blow hot air? No. 

Nigel: I am not in denial but am well informed…Yes the climate is changing (Always has) and mostly for the better and we may need some adaptation but we have time and it’s far from an emergency…

Patrice Ayme: I am looking directly across the Golden Gate bridge. I have no doubt that someday, California will have to dam the Golden Gate. Otherwise the most productive agricultural area of the USA will become an interior sea,  flooding twenty million people. 

A recent (2023) paper revealed a tidal way of melting for ice shelves, which had not been discovered prior. Thanks to this new activity, the many authors from many prestigious research centers double the rate of ice shelf melting. It was completely obvious, BTW, that this was happening, as ice shelves breathe with the tides.

I have observed that we are on a cataclysmic 7 degree C trajectory for 2100. France, which has very ancient precise readings, has the long term average at +1.7 C above the famed baseline from 1880 CE. Right now the entire planet is well above 1.5 C. This year, from El Nino, it’s likely going to come closer to +2C, as warm deep water is pushed up to the surface. One has to understand most of the planetary heating is in the polar regions. 

It is an emergency, but that does not mean we should run around like chickens… as we have been. If nuclear power had been developed as it should have been, with new types of reactors, electricity could be 100% carbon free, with safe, non-proliferating and non-polluting fission reactors. In France, Kremlin sponsored ecologists made a secret deal with the Socialist (PS) government of Lionel Jospin, in 1999, to stop nuclear energy, especially the research. Generations of know-how disappeared (French gov launched its nuclear program in January 1938, oldest in the world).  

Nigel: We are exiting an ice age and this has happened before and in the life cycle of humanity we have at least 3 measured periods when temperatures were far higher than the current predictions. 

PA: There are three episodes with temps equal or slightly superior (with three pulses less than 2 C above the present…). .. Around 120,000 years ago (Eemian), temps were not really higher than the present, except for one very short pulse 3C above the present…. but global sea level was 6 meters higher. The climate is full of surprises: there was a warm glaciation (!!!) 450 K years ago… But now we are guaranteed at least +4C within a century, and that’s not been the case for at least 3 million years, and probably much more.

Temp fluctuations in the past rarely happened at the present pace, and when they did (Dryas), that didn’t last.

Nigel: CO2 is at the lowest it’s been for 250 million years and we will be good with 3 times the current amount.

PA: Two centuries ago, we were around 250 ppm CO2, now we are getting close to 600 ppm EQUIVALENT CO2 (CO2 + CH4 + NOx + CFCs + etc.).Cattle in France contributes as much from its CH4 emissions as residential heating (12% of total CO2 equivalent each). Barring volcanism or impact, CO2 levels varied over millennia, or even millions of years (consider the end of the Cretaceous).

Nigel: The other fact is that our industrial impact on CO2 levels is insignificant 

PA: Going from 250 ppm to 600 ppm CO2 equivalents in 140 years is not insignificant. To boot, the main greenhouse gas is H2O, not CO2. The GreenHouse Gases (GHG) act through FORCING. It forces more H2O up, and that’s nonlinear. The exact function, called sensitivity, is unknown.

Observe that in the graph above the temperature curve seems to accelerate higher than the CO2 curve. That’s caused by the other GHG gases…. which add 1/3 of forcing. A better graph would have represented the GHG (which vary according to NOx and CFCs…)

***

Nigel: …and our biggest threat is we will destroy our prosperity and ability to fund adaptation by a panic to focus on so-called Net-Zero. So it’s drill baby drill and stop the nonsense on wind and solar and move to nuclear as quickly as possible to avoid pollution. Also reduce globalization and change to a fish farming strategy to save the oceans.

PA: I do not disagree with any of these points. Biden himself opened Alaska to drilling in a way Trump did not dare to do. My position is that massive research is needed. If prosperity is cut down, research will become impossible, which is the worst outcome.

Solar works (in combination with green hydrogen or derivatives). Wind is much more problematic, as the wind belts will migrate in the polar directions.
Nigel: On the trends of fires floods sea levels rise and weather induced tornados and such we see all danger trends reducing and our adaptive capability increases.. there is some work to do on forest fires but it’s NOT the climate but mainly our management approach.

Forests are burning and will burn. The Australian fires were so terrible that they changed the Pacific ocean surface temperature, and caused 3 La Nina in a row, desiccating California. The ravages of old growth forests in California have been heart breaking… even without fire. I documented them on this site with my own pictures. Years before the fires (which I predicted)

Climate Catastrophe: California Forests Dying. Giant Fires Coming In 2018

Nigel: The planet is doing just fine and will continue to do its variable thing…. 

PA: The biosphere could die from hypoxia (second worst case scenario) 

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/global-hypoxia/

It has already started: huge zones of the oceans are too low in oxygen for advanced animal life. It could get worse if the permafrost rots on a hypermassive scale.

Nigel: …it’s us I am worried about as we are moving from science based thinking toward self destructive religion based group think.
More at https://co2coalition.org Home – CO2 Coalition
I suggest you take the quiz… they have a debate in a few weeks I can plug you into to learn more.

My suggestion is you study this scientific based data and we chat more..

PA: An uncle of mine, a famous astronomer, was studying the subject, up at the Jungfrau observatory, in the Berner Oberland… a century ago!

I talked to him, long ago, about the subject of CO2 precisely ( he was mostly an astrophysicist). Founder of the Institut d’Astrophysique, Daniel Challonge was a member of the French Communist Party, and was forbidden to travel to the USA… Although he was the gentlest of souls. He founded the observatory, the Observatoire de Haute Provence, which discovered the first exoplanets (the two PIs, astronomers from Geneva got the Nobel)…

I have been science obsessed all my life. This (grand) uncle, a professional, was friends with my two grandfathers who were amateur astronomers. My own father, a geologist from Algeria who found Algerian gas and oil, was skeptical about the rise of-temperature (of course, he was born in Africa, and roamed the Sahara!) But he died from an African disease before the heat wave which killed thousands in France in 2003, the hottest since precise records started in 1540 CE. The heat caused a crop shortfall in parts of Southern Europe. The death toll has been estimated at more than 70,000, half of them in northern France. The records were beaten since, several times.

This year is guaranteed to shatter records, because of El Nino and the exponentiation of climate change.
Much more effort should be made towards nuclear, especially thermonuclear fusion. It can clearly work, but the efficiencies have to be boosted, and for that government sponsored fundamental research has to be lavishly funded. Star power is also the key to solar system colonization.

My uncle Daniel Challonge has a 30 kilometer diameter crater named after him on the Moon. So science, yes, I know, never leave a moment without it….

Patrice Ayme

Smoking Us Blind With Carbon Capture And Storage, The Demo-Rats Are…

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is supposed to capture carbon dioxide emissions from industrial sources and pump them deep underground where the CO2 can be imprisoned under huge pressure, or, if pressurized into cracked basalt, as found in Iceland, CO2 quickly combines into rock. Indeed, CO2 can be dissolved into water as bubbly, acidic champagne. Basalts contain high concentrations of calcium and magnesium ions that chemically react with CO₂ to make rocks such as calcite, dolomite, and magnesite. Stuff champagne, get rock. The process takes as little as two years. This is all true, and it is used on a very small scale in Iceland… a place full of pressurized CO2 and basalts…

Carbon Capture and Storage was a big winner in the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, signed into law during August 2022. But that version of CCS is a complete fake-out… Because the USA is not Iceland…. In the US, CCS is used to AUGMENT CO2 production. No way the clowns around Biden don’t know this.

 

C.C.S. is widely used by the FF industry, to boost the production of oil and natural gas. Natural gas processing facilities separate carbon dioxide from methane CH4, they are always mixed, similar bacteria producing  both. Some of these plants then pipe the “captured” carbon dioxide into what are known as enhanced oil recovery: it is re-injected into oil field reservoirs to increase their pressure and extract additional oil that would otherwise stay trapped underground.

 

Observe the cynicism of that conspiracy: CCS is presented as a climate solution, when actually it makes the situation worse!

 

Carbon Capture And Storage (CCS) is one more Public Relation way to sell Fossil Fuels (FF). 

On closer inspection, it’s just CO2 reinjection for FF, an old FF industry trick.

 

There are other ways to insure the survival of FF, such as so-called renewables without anything to store the energy they produce… except for ecologically, economically and financially expensive, inefficient batteries… which cannot be scaled up at the scale required, from lack of primary materials!  

 

Pseudo-ecologists have pushed for that renewables-battery trick, knowing full well it could not work at a sufficient scale for a positive climate impact, while extolling the virtue of Putin’s oil and gas, and hating nuclear solutions (except nuclear based in Russia or China).

 

Renewables, as they stand, are useless for transportation: no plane will move enough from windmills and solar panels on its back: the plane needs fuel. And that fuel can be obtained from renewables with pretty much only hydrogen. 

 

A gigantic infrastructure of renewables, and only renewables means intermittent energy, thus requires a full FF infrastructure capable of ensuring 100% production when there is no sun and no wind (a condition so frequent that it has a name the barometric swamp). If one has 100% of an extremely expensive equipment, one will use it.

 

CCS makes no sense at the most basic physics level: FF extracts Carbon C from the ground thn combines it with oxygen in the air, making CO2 and heat. CCS proposes then to return the C, with added oxygen into the ground. On the face of it, that looks circular: get C out, combine it with O2, then return CO2 into the ground. The latter step requires energy… On the face of it, as much energy as extracting C to start with, as it is to the same place it goes (and that makes no sense… except, as said above, if it is to pressurize a oil or gas field…).  

 

It is true that CCS works for special reasons in a particular place in Iceland. But they also have a new volcano in the area there: Iceland is a very special place (which produces enormous amounts of CO2 from its volcanoes). It is entirely possible that the capital of Iceland will disappear under a lava flow… propelled by CO2. But what is totally impossible is that CCS helps the world survive the present CO2 crisis…

 

That the Biden administration imposes on us this smoke and mirror is reminiscent of its promotion of women’s rights in Afghanistan… Carbon Capture and Storage is an example of conspirational, Machiavellian, plot. There is no way that its promoters do not know that this Fossil Fuels masquerading as “green”, or CO2 abating… Because CO2 augmentation is the way it is used right now, and no other usage is profitable.

Ah, but I forgot, there are no conspiracies, our masters told us, and if we think there are, we need to have our heads examined….

Patrice Ayme

This latest Iceland volcano produces up to hundred of thousands of tons of lava a day, all CO2 propelled. CO2 volcanic production prevents snowball Earth tendencies…. Notice the public on the slope, watching… In the Meradalir valley, 40 kilometers west of Reijavik…

Weathering Reinforced Orbital Glaciation Theory

I suggested that one could absorb CO2 by deliberately watering vast hot expanses of basalt and, or calcium or magnesium bearing tropical wastelands.
Friend Ian Miller pointed out in a comment that crushing rocks to achieve this required energy. I replied that, actually, I have seen immense expanses of desert in North America, South America, Mexico, Iran, Africa with such rock in a pulverulent form: no need to crush them, they are already completely crushed.

Then I remembered the Sahara, with thousands of kilometers of such pitiless desert. The highest mountain in the Sahara, as in Iran, is a volcano… But then I also remembered seeing prehistoric paintings there, of bucolic hunting scenes complete with hippopotamuses and trees… Imagine: that’s now an absolute desert: seeing one tree is seeing a miracle (one such tree is called “l’arbre du Tibesti”; it’s many thousands years old…).. Ah, but then, when the Sahara was wet, the watering, and the weathering, were achieved! CO2 was withdrawn from the atmosphere!

The white substance is natron, well-known to the Egyptians, in a giant caldera, the Trou au Natron, at the foot of an enormous shield volcano in Chad… In the middle of the Sahara. And not the largest volcano there. The cliffs are 1,000 meters tall. Yes, this all absorbs CO2 when wet…

So I suggest this: glaciations, in the last 2.75 million years were accentuated, reinforced by CO2 absorption from chemically interacting with rocks in the desert. Indeed, during glaciations, the giant circulation cells which create the arid subtropics are less aggressive and move south: the deserts become wet and green.

Now make no mistake: I am NOT saying that the orbital glaciation theory is false. I am just correcting it. I am adding a factor. The orbital theory of glaciation says that glaciations occur when it is too cold in July-August to melt snows in the Northern Hemisphere… where the continents mostly are (the southern equivalent is mostly ice-free: it’s an ocean, the “Roaring Forties”). The theory was first suggested by French mathematicians Joseph Alphonse Adhémar (1797–1862) who computed that ice ages were controlled by astronomical forces in his 1842 book Revolutions of the Sea. The idea is now associated with Milankovitch’s name. The theory’s recent Computer simulations show that this is (roughly) correct… Although various sticky mysteries remain.

I am just suggesting that the glaciating effect found by pure orbital and Earth rotation dynamics is amplified by the mechanism of CO2 diminution from rock chemistry I just described, in this essay and the preceding one.
Indeed orbital effects come short of explaining what is observed. Simulations and paleoclimate analysis show that the variation in Earth’s climate is much more extreme than the variation in the intensity of solar radiation calculated as the Earth’s orbit evolves. Methane release and the like doesn’t cut it yet. If orbital forcing causes climate change, and it does, science needs to explain why the observed glaciation effect is amplified compared to the theoretical, purely astronomical effect.

I just did.

Patrice Ayme

Massive Nonlinearity In Climate Now Obvious, And Why

If one thinks about it, much of life as we know it depends upon Earth’s white, icy poles. The temperature of Earth depends upon said polar regions. The poles, as long as they are covered with snow, reflect much sunlight back towards space. That’s why the poles are white: because they are reflectors. Remove the poles’ whiteness, and Earth will absorb much more sunlight, her average temperature will shoot up, and then the Earth’s albedo will decrease further (Whiteness = Albedo, in Latin).

This is already happening, the effect is self-feeding, and, thus, nonlinear (nonlinear means self-feeding; the master nonlinear effect is the exponential, which grows proportional to itself). The exponential derangement of the climate is already apparent in two ways:

1. the temperatures in the Arctic have climbed at a rate up to five or even ten times faster than anywhere else (as local whiteness, albedo, disappear).
2. at some point, one expects the global temperature to do the same, and exit the linear regime. This is exactly what one has observed in the last half a dozen years, as temperatures have shot up. Also the main warming system of the biosphere, El Nino, seems to be running for the second year in a row (it used to run only every seven years, or so). 

So we are leaving the linear rise in the greenhouse effects, to enter a faster, nonlinear phase.

This should not surprise anybody. Look at the CO2 graph, superimposed on a picture of Earth’s atmosphere (contemplate how thin it is!) The CO2 concentration is already massively nonlinear, and it is the main driver of climate, thus climate’s behavior can only be so.

That graph should be meditated upon. First put it on all the wall each decision maker looks the most at. Yes, horizontally, that’s half a million years…

Reality is even worse, as the graph above does not take into account other gases which have an even stronger greenhouse effect, individually than CO2, sometimes by a factor of thousands of times, per unit of mass, and which are all man-made. Nor CH4, methane, related to cattle bowels and decaying permafrost or warmed-up, exploding methane clathrates, in the preceding graph, although its greenhouse effect is huge.

CO2 concentrations are the highest since Homo Sapiens evolved. Also the change of greenhouse gas concentrations is the most brutal ever since at least 17 million years ago (when the Columbia LIP, Large Igneous Province, occurred, and, presumably, vast amounts of CO2 were injected in the atmosphere).

During the last high CO2 concentration, 110,000 years ago, although said concentrations were much less than now, average temperature got a bit higher than now (one Celsius). Sea level was at least seven meters higher. So as much is baked in, for sure. (Much of Florida and many countries, will then become shallow seas; Florida’s porous limestone will make it difficult to stop the sea.)

The nonlinear collapse of whiteness on Earth (“Earth albedo”) is apparent in the sudden collapse of the ice-covered regions in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, this last season 2016–2017. Clearly, linear graphs can’t be extended anymore, as far as spaceship Earth is concerned. Tickling the dragon by the tail works for a while, until one gets scorched!

Patrice Ayme’

 

Nuclear Winter? NO. Hélas.

Nuclear Winter Is Fake News. Nuclear war can, unfortunately, be fought:

Abstract: A little bit of thinking considering the largest H bombs exploded, volcanoes erupting, and recent giant fires in Kuwait, Indonesia, show that the hypothesized “observational” input on the Nuclear Winter theory was obviously false, not to say fake: H-bomb explosions cannot possibly have the cooling effect of a serious volcano: the material lifted by H bombs is neither enough, nor of the right quality, nor lifted high enough to cool the atmosphere as large volcanoes do. And the smoke of the subsequent fires, laden with carbon black, would not rise high enough for severe global effect as the eruption of a volcano such as Tambora.

***

Castle Bravo H Bomb, 15 Megatons, Larger US Explosion: Stronger Than Expected, Because, Unexpectedly, Lithium7, not just Lithium6, fabricated fast neutrons and Tritium . Severe Fall-Out. Yet, Nothing Like Tambora’s Eruption In 1814. No Nuclear Winter

We have lived, we still live, through the age of bogus theories, bogus, fake, false systems of thought, which we are supposed to adore like the “Golden Calf” of old.

Is this coming to an end? The Internet is putting a dent into old fashion gullibility, by exposing the cognitively innocent, the naive, and the nefarious psycho-rigid to alternative realities. 

Much of Economics, Islam, “Liberalism”, “Existentialism”, “Postmodernism”, “Neoconservatism”, let alone “Marxism”, or even small-minded “Darwinism”, unthinking assertions on allegedly impervious ice sheets, and other aspects of the CO2 crisis, is bogus, biased, pseudo-science, fake, false, even nefarious.

I just discovered (personally; it turns out some deep minds like F. Dyson, had figured it out long ago) that the famed theory known as “Nuclear Winter” was bogus. That came after an esteemed commenter on this site asked me a question about it. I had always “believed” there could be a nuclear winter

I have no computation to show, but, come to think of it, I don’t believe in nuclear winter. What I have looked at is not computation, but pictures. A picture can be worth a thousand computations, especially if it contradicts them.

For example, according to classical aerodynamics, bees can’t fly: they are heavy, they can lift with their small wings. However, fly they do: the picture of a bee flying is worth a thousand computations made with insufficient theories.

(It is likely that, thanks to their twisting wings, bees generate vortices, and vortices can be mighty: straight wingtips generate vortices which slow standard Twentieth Century planes down; when that was discovered, wingtips were made to reduce vortices; conversely, bees use that effect in reverse!)

GlouconX, an esteemed contributor to this site asked:

http://www.nucleardarkness.org/warconsequences/fivemilliontonsofsmoke/#with100

Hi Patrice:

I’ve been meaning to ask for your expertise on this. Apparently, scientific studies show that an even a small war with much smaller weapons than countries currently have would still doom the planet with a catastrophic nuclear winter. This means that even a small nuke power like Israel or Pakistan could extinguish the human species, does it not?

First I did not read GlouconX’s link, because the answer jumped at me. I had believed in Nuclear Winter, long ago. But then it struck me that the theory could only be false.

My answer:

I don’t want to rain on your nuclear winter, but I think those who brandish nuclear winter made a mistake. (I wrote this before researching the subject, and coming across the quotes below in, say, Wikipedia, which agree with my position that Nuclear Winter is a bogus theory.)

We have the proof, from direct observation of giant H bombs, and volcanoes exploding, to fires in Kuwait, Indonesia in the last two decades. Here is a quote from:

NASA warns of worst ever forest fires, environmental disaster, as smoke blankets six countries

“Fires in Indonesia are not like most other fires. They are extremely difficult to extinguish,” NASA says. And they’re dirty.

The estimated greenhouse gas emissions from the 1997 fires were higher than average daily emissions from the entire US economy, on at least 26 days, according to the World Resources Institute.

And this season alone, the fires have released greenhouse gases equivalent to about 600 million tons or roughly the annual carbon emission output of Germany, according to NASA scientists.”

The paper referred to by GlouconX threatens us with “five million tons of smoke” In Indonesia, we are speaking of probably more than a billion tons of smoke (adding the fine particle in the smoke, with suspended hydrocarbons, and the greenhouse gases).

***

Giant H-Bonbs Are Not Giant Volcanoes, Hydrocarbon Smoke, Not Sulfates:

A nuclear fireball rises very quickly, very high, bringing up plenty of soil if close to the ground, or just heated air if exploded up high. Castle Bravo’s, which was a super gigantic explosion, produced a mushroom cloud which reached 40 kilometers, and all the smoke from combustion, coming much later, will not reach that high… Differently from a super giant volcanic eruption, which sends specially absorbing materials (sulfates, SO2) extremely high.

Absolutely gigantic bombs were detonated in the past. The worst, Tsar Bomba destroyed structures 1,000 kilometers away. For a picture of Tsar Bomba and where Obama got his ideas about Pakistan:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/the-worst/

Anyway, even the worst explosion did not have much of a durable effect on the stratosphere. The explosion of Tambora in the early 19C created a local winter, for 100 hours: total darkness, cold… Then the cold extended all over the northern hemisphere, and the following year was the one ‘without a summer’: crops failed, because there was frost all over Europe, even in July, August. But that was a volcano. None of that with 15 megatons (US) and 50 megatons (USSR) bombs. The US one, Castle Bravo, was resting on the ground: that caused maximum fall-out, 2 kilometers crater, island annihilated, mushroom cloud of atoll debris going up 40 kilometers…

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

Even then, no nuclear winter to speak of… Nuclear winter proponents have to face the fact that the firestorm from exploding a nuclear bomb happens after the nuclear cloud has dissipated: three hours later for Hiroshima, thanks to Japanese paper houses.

Hiroshima’s blast was 16 kilotons. To duplicate a Hiroshima firestorm by conventional explosives would have used only 1.2 kiloton. The Nagasaki blast was more powerful: 22 Kilotons TNT. However, there was no firestorm. Nuclear bombs striking modern cities, even in India and Pakistan, would collapse concrete high rises, preventing fires, or at least fires so violent they could create a pyroclastic cloud reaching the stratosphere. During the Kuwait firestorm of more than 600 wells burning, up to six million barrels a day, the clouds stayed low, only rarely reaching 6,000 meters (whereas volcanic sulfates can be thrown well over 34,000 meters… that being the altitude for Pinatubo’s eruption of 1991…)  

***

Wikipedia Admits Implicitly That Nuclear Winter Is Bogus:

If one reads in Wikipedia about nuclear winter, one sees this, to start with:

“Nuclear winter is the severe global-climatic-cooling-effect, HYPOTHESIZED[1][2] to occur after the ignition of a number of firestorms.[3] Such fires, which can inject soot into the stratosphere have historically occurred in a number of cities, with nuclear winter researchers using both Hamburg and the LESS FEROCIOUS Hiroshima firestorms as the principal examples.[4] However, AS FIRESTORMS ARE MOST FREQUENTLY ENCOUNTERED IN MUCH LARGER AREA WILDFIRES, THESE LATTER FIRES ARE THE MOST SIGNIFICANT TODAY in assessing both the initial and present-day “nuclear winter” computer models.”

My point exactly.

A debate occurred in Nature in 2011. As Wikipedia puts it:

….”As MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel similarly wrote a review in nature that the winter concept is “notorious for its lack of scientific integrity” due to the unrealistic estimates selected for the quantity of fuel likely to burn, the imprecise GCM/global circulation models used, and ends by stating that the evidence of other models, point to substantial scavenging of the smoke by rain.[193] Emanuel would also make an “interesting point” about questioning proponent’s objectivity when it came to strong emotional or political issues that they hold.[194] Seitz also contends that many others are reluctant to speak out for fear of being stigmatized as closet Dr. Strangeloves, physicist Freeman Dyson of Princeton for example stated “It’s an absolutely atrocious piece of science, but I quite despair of setting the public record straight.”[195] Stephen Schneider for example was labelled a “fascist” for writing the critical paper, “Nuclear Winter Reappraised” according to Rocky Mountain News.”

It is characteristic of the PC disease: from pure Intellectual Fascism, many subjects are supposed to have PC assessments, and any deviation from the official PC view is characterized as “fascist”.

***

Unfortunately, the truth is worse than that: a nuclear war can be fought,

and it does not have to be small… So my angle is quite different. I don’t believe that exploding thousands of H bombs would have a significant effect on the climate (so the nuclear winter hypothesis is false, IMNSHO…). It’s true Pinatubo, the volcano, lowered temps by .5 Centigrade, worldwide. But the damned volcano sent very fine particles at an incredible height. H bombs won’t do that.

As I said, the truth is worse: nuclear war can be fought. It will have very adverse consequences, but it can be fought. It will kill billions, indirectly, by disrupting supplies, worldwide, starving people, exposing them to disease, secondary wars, cannibalism. But it can be fought.

During the 1940s and 1950s, the US systematically exposed soldiers and contractors, not just animals, to nuclear explosions. Once five guys were directly below an exploding  nuclear warhead in an air to air missile (detonation at 5,000 meters, 1.5 kt warhead). Photographers went from explosion to explosion, setting cameras a few hundred meters away, which took millions of pictures per seconds (most of them still classified). One of the most experienced of these photographers laconically commented that, whatever the H-bomb, he felt confident he knew what to do and how to survive it from some distance away… After the initial blinding flash which makes everything white, the fireball is exquisitely beautiful, with its sky filling ultra violet glow.  

One Triumphant class French sub is undetectable, with its jet propulsion.

Triumphant carries 16 inter oceanic M51 missiles with ten MIRVs, each 150 kt (ten Hiroshima). One such missile could take out New York conurbation (pop 16 million). One, a single one, rogue sub of that class could basically kill half of the US, with a bit of luck…

We know that during the Cuban Missile crisis, one admiral, who was there mostly by accident, stopped the commander of a sub and the political/communist officer to fire a nuclear armed torpedo at an US carrier…

This means someone like Kim will be able to blackmail the US, within 5 years he basically announced for the New Year…

As Trump said, it won’t happen. No need to see Hitler getting ready this time, better than last time. As it is the West, if Russia stays neutral, can easily defang the rest of the world nuclearly, now.

If I were president, I would go see Putin, and have a frank discussion. US “INTELLECTUALS” misadvised big time the leaders of Russia in the 1990s… This has to be straightened out, and the competition with Russia should stop.

The danger of nukes is that they are city killers, and the tech to stop them, when they streak down at Mach 25, for sure does not really exist (lasers being the grail there… but lasers of a power we don’t have yet…)

Nuclear war can be fought, and it will be fought, lest measures are taken now. The Five Permanent members of the United Nations Security Council have no interest, and will have long no interest, whatsoever, to engage in nuclear war (they all control huge territories over land, and, or, sea (the latter as France, the US and the UK do). But plenty of other powers could have at some point interest to engage in war (the prime example being North Korea, Pakistan’s Wahhabists, another…).

To cut these dreadful possibilities down, one has to dramatically reduce the nuclear weapons arsenals. Start with Launch On Warning.

This is all the more urgent as “Nuclear Winter” has scared people away from nuclear war. Earlier, the exaggerated  fear of nuclear fallout scared people away from nuclear war. Extreme fear of fallout was justified in the 1950s, when the giant H bombs were tested: lack of precision in delivery made the military go for giant explosions. Nowadays military warheads have to be smaller (to be accompanied with lures and other devices) and precision is extreme.

Nowadays, a nuclear war looks, to specialists, like something that could be fought and won. The rumors have it that some Russian generals are ready to strike fear and submission in European contradictors, with a few well-placed nuclear explosions. Slipping down such a slippery slope has to be avoided. But that slippery slope will be best avoided by understanding exactly which consequences nuclear war entails. Nuclear winter is not one of these consequences.

Patrice Ayme’

Trumped By Jurassic Climate Nonlinearly Erupting

Trump is climate skeptic, it is said, but the climate is not skeptic about Trump. Humanity is the crew, and Earth the spaceship. Trump is now in charge, if anybody is in charge, after eight years of … boyhood. It’s supposed to be a racial insult, I learned. But question: where is the insult, when a 47-year-old (age of Obama when he was sworn in) is supposed to lead the planet, knowing what few other know (as Joe Biden reminded us this week).

Obama went to Germany, and sang the praises of Angela Merkel, her wisdom, etc. Arguably, however, Merkel has been disastrous: her austerity policy, combined with her refusal to support France militarily in a significant way, by re-establishing peace in Syria, manu military, has brought more than one million refugees to Germany, and a near economic and political collapse of Europe (think Brexit, exodus from Portugal, etc.)

All what Obama knows is that his financial sponsors and paymasters tell him austerity is great, Quantitative Easing is great, inequality is great, but we can live with it, etc. 

Spectacular Heat Is On Where It Hurts Most: The High Arctic. November 2016.

Meanwhile, Earth’s climate is acting up. The temperature in the Arctic is way above normal. A full twenty degrees Celsius above normal (that’s 36 degrees F above normal). As a result, ice is having a problem forming. Should the situation perdure until the sun starts shining again above the Arctic, a complete disappearance of sea ice, comes next summer, is imaginable… Sea ice levels in at the North Pole are at a record low, by a long shot.

Planetary climate is self-regulating… Except if pushed too far. Planetary climate consists in several entangled machines. The overall climate pattern in place in the last three million years is a Carnot engine, with a heat source, the tropic, and a cold sink, the poles.

Right now, the poles are still very cold, but more energy has been pumped into the tropics, from the increasing greenhouse (what’s called “climate forcing”, 60% due to COE, 17% due to CH4, and the rest completely from man-made gases like NOx). Thus the climate engine is roaring more than ever (it gets more efficient, from an equation Carnot discovered nearly two centuries ago). An effect, as I predicted long ago, is that more energy will be stored dynamically (jet stream twisted all over) and potentially (high and low pressure systems both more so).

This is what we observe.

How will it evolve? Among the entangled machinery, some is (still) dormant: fabulous quantities of methane are locked in a sort of ice in medium depth sea floor, and more in the tundra. Should those be released, the temperature of the planet would go up five degrees Celsius nearly instantaneously, and, in turn, huge quantities of CO2 locked in the northern latitudes would be released.

Once the latter happens (it’s more a question of when, not if, barring vast technological advances), Earth would go back to Jurassic conditions nearly instantaneously.  

What can one do? First have everybody understand the danger. Differently from the dinosaurs, or the mammals who lived under them, we have the means to understand and act.

Obama had as National Security Adviser a politically, dynastically connected woman, with lots of stocks and connections, but not a warrior. Trump just selected as National Security adviser a four (no, three, thanks Richard Reinhofer!) star Lieutenant General, Michael Flynn. Flynn, ex head of the Delta Force, became Director Army Intelligence in 2012 (however, Obama never met with him, and fired him for being too tough about Radical Islamism). That’s a rational choice. Flynn is a “registered Democrat” (that is, not GOP).

The general considers “RATIONAL” to be afraid of Islam. And then recommended to propagate that message, because rationality is not afraid (OK, agreed, Flynn made the mistake of saying “afraid of Muslims” instead, as he should have, “afraid of Islam”.)

General Flynn ✔@GenFlynn

Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL: please forward this to others: the truth fears no questions... http://youtu.be/tJnW8HRHLLw

5:14 PM – 26 Feb 2016 Or this:@FieldofFight — Obama and Hillary’s Refusal to Name Radical Islamic Terrorism: Aiming to ‘Dumb Us Down’ – Breitbart

As the New York Times puts it: “General Flynn…sees the United States as facing a singular, overarching threat that can be described in only one way: “radical Islamic terrorism. All else is secondary for General Flynn, and any other description of the threat is “the worst kind of political correctness,” he said in an interview three weeks before the election.

Islamist militancy poses an existential threat on a global scale, and the Muslim faith itself is the source of the problem, he said, describing it as a political ideology, not a religion. He has even at times gone so far as to call it a cancer.

For General Flynn, the election of Mr. Trump represents an astounding career turnaround. Once counted among the most respected military officers of his generation, General Flynn was fired after serving only two years as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He then re-emerged as a vociferous critic of a Washington elite that he contended could not even properly identify the real enemy — radical Islam, that is — never mind figure out how to defeat it.”

I have argued that Literal Islam is totally incompatible with civilization. And the best proof is that what was long the world’s richest area, the Middle East (including the Fertile Crescent, Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia) became one of the poorest.

Clearly the voters agreed (Trump destroyed the famed “Blue Wall” of states Democrats thought were secured, and thus got a large Electoral College victory).

Islam, a savage-from-the-desert Middle Age system of thoughts and moods is nothing much, a self-destructive obsession. However, as it has invaded the Western psyche, it has become a distracting cancer. To handle the serious problems, like the planet blowing up, we have to reduce this sort of maddening distractions. Nor can we talk falsely about Islam, while talking truly about the climate. The mood of telling the truth has to be global. Irreverential. The Obama administration and its poodle regimes (Merkel, France, etc.) have been talking falsely not just about Islam, but also about economics, society, globalocracy, plutocracy, taxes, taxes on the wealthiest, corporate fascism, dark money, etc.

They talked falsely about Islam, precisely because the Obama adminstration, and the Deep State

Obama, talking at Der Spiegel: “Many people who voted for me, voted for Trump… I think that’s indicative that there is some impulse towards some sort of change, politicans have to be more sensitive to the desire for change.” where have you been my lost son? Obama sounds increasingly like Sleeping Beauty waking up after eight years’ slumber…

In any case, Trump is telling the truth about Islam, or even Mexicans (“terrific people”). Let’s keep truth momentum. Trump seems willing to replace wishful thinking by rationality (just as the pivot to Russia, however worrisome and potentially dangerous it is, is better than Obama’s boiled noodle opposition).

Meanwhile, there is little doubt that the climate has started to act nonlinearly.  It will be rational to also act even more nonlinearly in return.

Patrice Ayme’

CLIMATE CHANGES: CO2, Islam, & The Eternal Return Of Fascism

Another day, another Islamist attack in France. This was “Islam de France“, as it is among all too many youth. The two (French) Islamist “martyrs” were shot dead by the BRI (Brigade d’Intervention Rapide). Armed with knives and a gun they took hostage several parishioners in a church. The 86 year old priest was made to kneel before his throat was cut. Several other elderly persons were cut. The Islamist “martyrs” were so busy filming their “heroic” deeds, that a nun was able to escape discreetly, and alerted the police. As with the latest attack in Bavaria at a music concert two days ago, the Islamist pseudo-state ISIS claimed it set it up. The area, in rural Normandy, is known as one of the most Islamized places in France, thanks to a Salafist mosque (which, if one followed Israeli methods, would have been dynamited long ago!)

No wonder Donald Trump wants “extreme vetting” of French visa applicants.

Yes, I know, it’s dreary. Yes I know, among the looming threats gathering out there, Islamism is the silliest fanatical cretinism on steroids. However, Islamism is dreadful enough to cause great dislocation, and lack of focus on the real problems. After all, it was the (de facto) pro-Islamist mood which Kanzler Merkel organized, all by herself. The reaction to this pro-Islam mood, in turn, broke the European Union’s back with Brexit (I watch plenty of German TV, and I was aghast with the let’s-embrace-Islam mood the Merkel-led authorities promoted rashly, with their naive approach… Admitting refugees (which I am for) is one thing, welcoming the mood of the religion which has caused the refugee crisis is something else: it is in an absolute contradiction).

Want to see a real threat? Something really hot and hard? Here it is, spiking up, as I said it would, so long ago: 

Climate Changes: CO2, Islam, & The Eternal Return Of Fascism. Temperature In 2016 Is Exceeding All Expectations Scientists Who Are Paid To Sound Nice Officially Expected.

[Image source: Dr. Stephan Rahmstorf. Data source: NASA GISS. Data 1880 CE to April 2016.]

What is the reason for this sharp spike? Fundamentally the global rise in temperature is driven by the man-made GreenHouse Gases (GHG: CO2, CH4, NOx, ClFs, etc.). The GHGs block infrared radiation more than normal air does, trapping heat in the biosphere. This “climate forcing” warms up the lower atmosphere (and cools the irrelevant stratosphere!) The GHG density is increasing at a steady pace from human industry. But the resulting warming, and thus the GHG emissions have clearly now started to self feed. (How do we know this? From the divergence of the graphs. More on this another day.)

What of the change of mental climate Islam brings? Is it benevolent as the proselytizers of Islam claim, a “religion of peace”? Or do we need to read what is really going on, and find out why 18 year olds with criminals pasts, and no education to speak of, know Islam way better that judicial and legislating authorities in the West claim to?

Those who fight for Islam get “special reward”:

Quran (4:95) – “Not equal are those believers who sit (at home) and receive no hurt, and those who strive and fight in the cause of Allah with their goods and their persons. Allah hath granted a grade higher to those who strive and fight with their goods and persons than to those who sit (at home). Unto all (in Faith) Hath Allah promised good: But those who strive and fight Hath He distinguished above those who sit (at home) by a special reward.”

Those who don’t help God, go to hell:

Quran (9:39) – “If ye go not forth God will afflict you with a painful doom…”

When fighting the unbelievers, God hates a coward and throws him to hell:

Quran (8:15-16) – “O ye who believe! when ye meet the Unbelievers in hostile array, never turn your backs to them. If any do turn his back to them on such a day – unless it be in a stratagem of war, or to retreat to a troop (of his own)- he draws on himself the wrath of Allah, and his abode is Hell,- an evil refuge (indeed)!”

Those who die, fighting for God, go to paradise:

Quran (3:169-170) – “Think not of those who are slain in Allah’s way as dead. Nay, they live, finding their sustenance in the presence of their Lord; They rejoice in the bounty provided by Allah: And with regard to those left behind, who have not yet joined them (in their bliss), the (Martyrs) glory in the fact that on them is no fear, nor have they (cause to) grieve.”

As usual, the preceding is confirmed, and amplified, in numerous parts of the Hadith and the Sira:

Muslim (20:4678) – It has been reported on the authority of Jabir that a man said: “Messenger of Allah, where shall I be if I am killed?” He replied: “In Paradise.” The man threw away the dates he had in his hand and fought until he was killed (i. e. he did not wait until he could finish the dates).

Abu Dawud (14:2515) – I asked the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him): Who are in Paradise? He replied: “Prophets are in Paradise, martyrs are in Paradise.”

If you are young, depressed, and believe in the preceding, and surrounded with what preachers and sacred texts tell you are unbelievers who deserve to die, what would you do? The answer is all too obvious.

I was watching a top, senior, just retired, French judge,  and she calmly pontificated that youth who committed assassinations of unbelievers in the name of Islam perverted Islam. Well, if you read Islamist sacred texts, you can judge the judge. I judge that judges like that, who pontificate that fanatical Jihadists “pervert Islam”  are themselves perverse idiots and could well be viewed to be a deeper source of terrorism than the youth who commits such assassinations, to start with. Yes, some will say I am out-Trumping Trump. But think about it: the white judge just claim that Islam, Literal Islam, is perfect, and youth was perverse. OK, then the judges say that the quotes above are perfect, while accusing those who act on them of what, exactly?

Another angle on the same problem: imagine that a youthful would-be assassin confronts a judge. The judge tells the youth to be less perverse and to follow Islam more closely? In the case of the assassination of the priest this happened precisely with one of the two 19-year-old Islamist assassin: the youth opined that he would be a better Muslim, follow the Qur’an better. So he was judged mature enough by a lady judge to be freed from jail, where he had been for eight months after being arrested in Turkey for trying to slip into Syria.

The climate in the West has been that Islam was good, whereas poor youth was bad, uneducated, not worth of correct schooling and employment. Verily, the truth is the other way around: Islam has been good for plutocracy, and orienting, actively or indirectly, youth towards Islam, Literal, Wahhabist, Salafist Islam, a perversion.

***

When Climate Changes, Species Go, And Smarter Ones Thrive:

Dinosaurs, pterosaurs, mesosaurs, plesiosaurs, and the like were all what some now call “mesotherms”: their temperature was in-between. They depended too much upon the balmy Jurassic and then Cretaceous climate to insure their own temperature. When the climate cooled, they faltered, and then disappeared. Whereas the hot “endotherms” (self-warm), mammals and birds, thrived.

A change of climate changes which species thrive, or even exist. It is the same with ruling systems of ideas, such as religions, and the mental climates they bring.

Islam created a wonderful climate among desert nomads. Prior to it, Arabs were at each others’ throats, and killed girls to limit the population explosion. Meanwhile, the Arabs were fully exposed, and frustrated, by the great civilizations swirling around them: Ethiopian, Yemenite, Egyptian, Zoroastrian, and then the formidable Greco-Roman civilization, and its partial descendant, the Persian Sassanid empire. However, soon after 605 CE things changed: a formidable war between Sassanids (Zoroastrian Persians) and “Rome”, turned suddenly to Persia’s advantage (the Persian Shah In Shah was all the bolder as the Romans had put him back on his throne earlier: a case of back-stabbing).

It is a long story, and I want to tell it (but will have to do so some other time). It is a matter of climate. In more ways than one.

***

Mental Climate Catastrophes Brought Islam:

To understand the change of species which Islam brought, one has to understand the anti-intellectual climate which brought a deep mental freeze in “Rome” (Constantinople), and the influence the resulting refugee crisis of fleeing Roman intellectuals had in Persia. Then a terrible storm arose: an all-out war between Constantinople and Persia, of an extraordinary violence, back and forth, like a tsunami going one way, and then the other.

Thanks to a crazed out Persian emperor, Persia made the greatest invasion of the Mediterranean basin in 1,000 years, even conquering all the way to Libya, something it had never done before. By 622 CE, the situation was so desperate, that emperor Heraclius thought of evacuating the Roman capital to Carthage. Just when the enormous reforms he had made back to a citizen army and other reconstitution of ancient Greco-Roman traditions, changed the climate completely in the Roman empire. That change of mood mobilized the population, and enabled to reverse the military tide.

***

Why Islam Swept All:

Islam is a war religion. As simple as that. It went much further that way that Roman Catholic Orthodox had (= Christianism imposed by the Roman state, now headed from Constantinople and Milan). Christianism celebrated a “Lord” mimicking Constantine’s behavior. That included the summary execution of the son… and Verses of the Sword:  Luke 19; 27 is unambiguous. The mythic Jesus Christ supposedly said:

“But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”

It could not be any clearer. A total negation of the state of law. A proclamation of human sacrifice. Yes, when thinking of religion, remember this: human sacrifice is about having a religious reason for killing others.

“Religious” means non-legal. “Legal” does not just mean legal in the Roman sense, but legal in the ethological sense.

Hence the imposition of (fascist, mono-dictatorial, lethal, jealous, imperious) Christianism, between Roman emperors Constantine and Theodosius (both initially generals, reigning absolutely on the entire empire) changed the climate completely. Instead of having a state of law, one passed to a state of caprice of the emperor, sultan, prophet or caliph at the head. Or, as Constantine modestly depicted himself “thirteenth apostle”.

This anti-intellectual climate appeared just when a greater intellectual activity was called for. This is what generally happens, it’s no accident.

Meanwhile, to the south-east, the Arabs saw all of this. They saw the Persians invade Yemen and seize Aden. They saw Rome nearly collapse, and, while Muhammad was fighting Mecca from Yathrib (= Medina), from 622 Ce to 630 CE, he saw the fabulous Roman counter-attack, and Persia collapse in coups, civil wars, queens reigning for a year or two, top generals assassinated…

The Roman nadir was in 622 CE. In 630 CE, Muhammad was religious dictator of Mecca. As a prophet, he could re-organize the Qur’an, and he did. Exit the kind, loving and tolerant Islam. However, quite a bit of the Meccan religious arsenal was preserved, including perhaps the Satanic Verses, and certainly the Moon as a symbol, Mecca as a religious center, complete with meteorite and recycled Kabaa.

So Muhammad changed the climate, but not too much where not needed. Instead he led a crusade of united warriors to the north, to attack the Romans (who smirked and avoided contact, as they had just concluded peace with the Sassanid Persians, reconstituting the old borders… and had decided to spurn Monophysite Arabs).

Kill or fight the enemy, go to paradise? What better mental climate to impose an empire?

What is sure is that, if we don’t kill the CO2 rise pretty soon, the notion of paradise will change. And that this Literal Islam, Salafism, Wahhabism, Wall Street compatible Islam, thing is an un-amusing distraction.

***

Nothing new under the sun; civilizations can die quickly:

1,500 years ago, or so, the mighty Moche civilization, along the coast of Peru knew a drought and a super El Nino (certainly amplified by natural climate change, probably of volcanic origin).

The Moche survived initially, but their religion became all-consuming (full of human sacrifices and pyramids). It is the usual reaction: when a society gets stressed, it reacts as a baboon troop: everybody of one mind, behind the chief (right now Trump).

In a civilization, if more than one fascist movement appear (say the Communists at the same time as the Nazis, as in Germany in the 1920s; or Syria now), civil strife ensues. This is what happened to the Moche, and in such a violent manner, that the civilization collapsed.

Something similar, a super drought in the Seventh Century, accompanied by civil war and ecological devastation, nearly eradicated the Mayan civilization, thereafter a shadow of its former self (until the Spaniards showed up, 6 centuries later).

***

“Hydraulic Dictatorships” And, Or Fascist Over-Reaction?

The basic problem of the zone where Islam festers, has been ecological. A massive, epochal drought, tied to the interglacial cycle, started more than 6,000 years ago, triggering the Egyptian civilization. The drought forced the Egyptians to get along with agriculture, in a very long and narrow valley, and vast associated oases, where hydraulic was crucial. Fernand Braudel rightly introduced the notion of “Hydraulic Dictatorship”. And the reasoning is obvious: big hydraulics means big society, armies of workers, relative wealth, hence big army to protect the whole thing, etc. So I supported that reasoning (which I had developed on my own). However, I am starting to have second thoughts: after all, many Western societies, including some Greek city-states, and Rome for much of her history, and the various regimes which descended from the Franks/French, including England, did not fall into the same pattern (nor did Egypt, mostly, for that matter).

After all, the entire region was long the richest in the world, where many Neolithic and civilization basic techniques were discovered, invented and blossomed. And the climate got desperately dry 6,000 years ago, when the deserts became basically uninhabitable. Still, the area was at the very forefront of civilization until the massive Celto-Greco-Roman (“The West”) took over, starting 23 centuries ago. Some of the degeneracy occurred before Islam, or even just before the Hellenistic civilization of the Trojan War took off. However Babylonians and later, the Achaemenid empire still made civilizational innovations. And yet the fact the Achaemenids’ greatness depended mostly upon one man, Darius The Great a sort of Zoroastrian Muhammad, with more brains, experience and statesmanship, reveals the truth: the Middle Earth had become way too fascist already 3,000 years ago, used as it was, by then, upon depending on just one individual. A climate of intellectual fascism had come to rule. (It’s no coincidence that the monotheism of Abrahamism, blind obedience to the Lord, mauling all and any human decency, came to fester there.)

So what could be going on? The mental climate may have over-reacted to the increasingly desertic situation. A climate of intellectual fascism had come to rule, and rightly so. Yet, in my view, there was an overshooting of the fascist mood. A bit like an immune system over-reacts, and a lethal auto-immune disease develops. True, strong government were needed, associated to strong religions, such as Judaism, and Constantine’s “Catholicism”. A bit of the Dark Side is often necessary. But Islam ended changing the mental climate way too far to the Dark Side (contemplate the quotes above).

Political and intellectual fascism can self feed, through religious effect (= the madness of the crowds), similarly to the self-feeding of the climate we are witnessing now (the ever crazier ending of the Nazi regime is a case in point! The more desperate the military situation was getting, the more insanely lethal the Nazis became, including against their own ilk!) Thus, as fascism arises from bad situations, as a healthy, and most effective defense reflex, it can bring in an even worse situation, through its own actions, which, in turn, ask for even more fascist action. Just as, the higher the temperature, the more methane and carbon dioxide released, hence more greenhouse, more temperature, thus more methane and carbon dioxide, etc…

The climate is changing, whether we want it or not. We have to do as the Egyptians did, 6,000 years ago: change minds, moods and civilization. We have to do much because now history is moving at the fastest clip ever. And history shows that civilizations which lasted many centuries, or even millennia, can collapse in days, and commonly do so in years.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Geoengineering: Unsafe & Ineffective Folly

The climate crisis is accelerating (as anticipated): weird fluctuations of temperatures all over. It was colder than at the North Pole in many areas, 6,000 kilometers to the south. Some scientists contribute to the crisis by claiming that the Earth could be fixed by “geoengineering”. The idea is to make the atmosphere reflective above its lowest, and warmest layers. The prospect of salvational geoengineering  gives a dangerous sense of hope, and enable cowards to change the conversation. The one and only conversation ought to be: how to reduce Greenhouse gases emissions before self-feeding natural processes take over, and the warming becomes not just non-linear, but self-amplifying.

Above freezing, at the North Pole, in the last few days of 2015: enormous warm masses of air or water moving powerfully is how ice gets destroyed.

Gregory Benford, astrophysicist and sci fi author is one of the advocates of the man-made volcano idea. See Climate controls, Reason Magazine, November 1997. In brief, one would spray a lot of micron-sized dust into the atmosphere above the Arctic Sea during the summer. Benford suggested diatomaceous earth as an option, because it’s chemically inert: just silica.

Then, thinking again, Benford suggested poisonous gases: SO2 and H2S. What could go wrong? Apprentice sorcerers would sprinkle those poisons to diminish sunlight in summer (they say). Simulations by the naive, for the naive, show it may mitigate sea ice retreat.

In reality, Polar hurricanes can shatter huge amounts of ice, while stuffing the Arctic for weeks with warm air, resulting in record sea ice loss. The spectacular shrinkage of the sea ice in August 2012 was caused by an extremely violent warm, hurricane like storm which physically broke thick ice with enormous waves.

There is evidence that ice melting is not just due to a warm sunshine, but to the secondary paroxysms of massive dynamic and potential (pressure) events. Sprinkling a hurricane with SO2 won’t do a thing, one may as well throw sugar at a tempest to pacify it.

When the Larsen B iceshelf in the Antarctica peninsula collapsed, something similar happened: four days of force one hurricane winds and a record high temperature of nearly 15 degrees centigrade (60 F).

Benford was quoted approvingly even recently on his general train of ideas: “Many fear if we lose the sea ice in summer ocean currents may alter; nobody really knows”. May alter? Well, that’s obsolete: currents are changing and they are warmer.

The naive idea that we have possible, feasible, potential geoengineering means to fight the melting of the polar ice. Delusion, illusion, obfuscation, prevarication, not to say fornication (with big oil).

Trying to put up a veil over polar areas (through various debris or SO2 suspended) will not work. But don’t volcanoes work? The enormous eruptions of Pinatubo, and the one, much worse of Indonesia’s Tambora in 1815, cooled the atmosphere dramatically (Tambora’s atmospheric veil caused freezing the following summer in Europe, and partial failure of crops).

The main problem is that the melting of the Arctic and even worse, the melting of the Antarctic, is going to happen from BELOW. Sneaky. It is oceanic water, densest at four degrees centigrades (nearly 40 degrees F) which is seeping below, and causing the melting.

An article just published in Science (December 2015) explains that one particular, giant glacier has retreated by tens of kilometers, after being exposed to oceanic currents which are just ONE degree centigrade higher than the old normal, along the north-east tip of Greenland. Those currents are the return currents from the Gulf Stream extension which hit Spitzberg.

To quote from the abstract: “After 8 years of decay of its ice shelf, Zachariæ Isstrøm, a major glacier of northeast Greenland that holds a 0.5-meter sea-level rise equivalent, entered a phase of accelerated retreat in fall 2012. The acceleration rate of its ice velocity tripled, melting of its residual ice shelf and thinning of its grounded portion doubled, and calving is now occurring at its grounding line. Warmer air and ocean temperatures have caused the glacier to detach from a stabilizing sill and retreat rapidly along a downward-sloping, marine-based bed. Its equal-ice-volume neighbor, Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden, is also melting rapidly but retreating slowly along an upward-sloping bed. The destabilization of this marine-based sector will increase sea-level rise from the Greenland Ice Sheet for decades to come.”

So the real problem is not to throw a veil above the Arctic, when the sun shines. The real problem is how to cool the Gulf Stream, (a portion of) the world’s master current. (Note to would-be geoengineers: putting a big refrigerator between Florida and the Bahamas, will not work, for a number of reasons.)

Measurements and a back of the envelope computation shows that the anomalous heat content so far stored in the upper 750 meters of the world ocean is about twenty times that stored in the atmosphere… And the ocean is playing catch up (the temperature of this layer is up only half that of the atmosphere; deeper parts are also warming up).

We are coming close to a tipping point on three giant basins in Antarctica (the WAIS, Aurora, and Wilke basins): oceanic water is boring through the sills there. After the sill, the basin slope down (under the weight of the ice), deeper than the Grand Canyon. The melting of each of these basins will rise sea level by seven meters.

Conclusion: only the outlawing, ASAP, of the burning of fossil fuels will mitigate the catastrophe. Anything else, like Elementary School engineering suggestions, is a distraction from the task at hand: decarbonification.

Engineering can work: modern nuclear energy, ever improving solar photovoltaic energy, and various storages, from dams, to molten salt tanks, to, of course hydrogen.

A hydrogen electric car equipped with existing fuel cells, an 40 kilograms of compressed hydrogen, safely stored in tanks resisting to 700 Bars, thus, to any collision), could cross the entire USA, without refueling.

This is exactly why the Obama administration yanked the research and deployment of those cars: otherwise pure electric vehicles and their abysmal small little range, would not have had a chance… Politics is a much twisted thing, but its Arianne thread is money… Such as the big money subtle corruption brings.

Solar PhotoVoltaics could split water, and make hydrogen to store energy, of course.

Patrice Ayme’

Antarctica Disintegrating Soon

[One more essay to contribute to the Paris’ CO2 negotiations!] One has to be careful with science. Science is certain knowledge. And certain knowledge is not just hard to gather, it is subtle, and even harder to organize in a coherent logic. It is pretty much certain that Antarctica will melt (in my opinion). However a NASA study, just out, claims that Antarctica is gathering a huge amount of ice:

“A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.

The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.

According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.”

If One Looks Carefully, One Can See The Three Places Where Warm Water Is Sneaking In Below (In Green & Blue in WAIS and In East Antarctica).

This, paradoxically, does not contradict any of my apocalyptic predictions about Antarctica. Quite the opposite: a greater snowfall is a mark of a warming climate. Warmer air carries more moisture. The gathering of snow and ice in the interior and at high altitude, over wide expanses has not effect to the melt extending below.

In truth, the situation is dire and will evolve quickly. One is reminded of the Space Shuttle Columbia, when hot gases penetrated in its left wing. After they got in, they melted vital equipment all over inside, including hydraulics, and the shuttle struggled for control, finally losing its wing.

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=4347

Antarctica’s ice shelves — the thick, floating slabs of ice which encircle the continent — are melting. The shelves slow and stabilize the glaciers, hundreds of kilometers behind them. They are succumbing to a hidden force: deep, warming ocean currents are melting the ice from beneath ice shelves, and up giant valleys penetrating the continent.

The collapse of small ice shelves caused glaciers to accelerate two-fold to ten-fold and spill more ice into the ocean, raising sea level. A study published in April shows that more ice shelves are threatened: From 1994 to 2012, the rate of ice shelf shrinkage increased twelvefold. Parts of the ice sheet considered at risk hold enough ice to raise the global sea level by 22 feet (seven meters). Here’s the latest on Antarctica’s vulnerability in 2015:

More Snow, Less Ice:

Climatologists speculated in the 1990s that Antarctica might slow sea level rise. They fancied that rising temperatures would produce more water vapor, leading to more snowfall and more ice. This is indeed what the latest NASA study shows. Researchers reported in March, and November 20215, that over the past 20,000 years, warmer temperatures have indeed correlated with higher snowfall: For each Fahrenheit degree of warming, snowfall increased by about 2.7 percent. But that does not mean the threat of fast melting receded..

Larsen B’s Last Gasp:

Glaciologists reported in June that the last remnant of the Larsen B Ice Shelf is splintering, and glaciers flowing into it are accelerating. Its approaching demise continues a disturbing trend: the progressive collapse of five ice shelves since 1989.

Next, Larsen C:

The neighboring, and much larger Larsen C Ice Shelf, a significant part of the Antarctica Peninsula, could soon collapse (hey, it’s summer!). A major crack is advancing rapidly, reaching an unprecedented 60 miles long in early 2015. (A British base in the Ross Ice Shelf is threatened by another advancing crack, and is scheduled to be moved ASAP! A German base disappeared altogether.)

Southern Peninsula “Starting to Sweat “:

(“Sweating” was the term used in a scientific report…) While the glaciers in this region seemed stable, warming ocean currents have been melting the belly of the ice. Results published in May show this region crossed a threshold in 2009, with a dozen major glaciers simultaneously starting to thin, “sweating off” 60 billion tons of ice per year.

Weak Underbelly:

The Amundsen Sea coast is the vulnerable underbelly of West Antarctica. Its glaciers slide on beds that lie nearly a mile below sea level, exposing them to ocean currents. New data show ice shelves are collectively losing 100 billion tons of ice per year, and glaciers have accelerated by up to 70 percent.

Hidden Hazards in the East:

East Antarctica, situated on high ground that protects it from warming ocean currents, was considered stable, impervious, a Reich to last 10,000 years, strong and dominating. But not exactly, according to surveys with ice-penetrating radar. A March study shows that one large swath of the ice sheet sits on beds as deep as 8,000 feet below sea level and is connected, by very long, deep valleys to warming ocean currents. Totten Glacier, one of East Antarctica’s largest ocean outlets, is already thinning — an ominous sign, since this single glacier drains enough ice from the AURORA Basin to raise the sea level more than all of West Antarctica’s ice loss would. The mouth of the Totten glacier is well north of the southern polar circle. This means that the potential for warming from decreased albedo is considerable.

The same story is unfolding with the Wilkes Basin, as I have explained.

Thus, right now, sea level is rising slowly, and climate change deniers are chuckling, because Antarctica is gathering warm snow. But, once the warm currents penetrate in force, and they will, Antarctica will go the way of the Space Shuttle: sudden, irresistible disintegration.

A last riddle is that, should the latest story (above) from part of NASA, be correct (and not another piece of disinformation to serve the fossil fuel plutocracy, as happened more than once in the past), how come sea level is increasing as fast as is presently observed? The math just don’t add up: the greatest contribution to sea level rise comes in with the wrong sign! So either the latest NASA accumulation studies are wrong, or there is a massive contribution to sea level rise undetected so far (the worst is imaginable…) Just when we saw that the Green House Gas disaster was boring in its irresistible unfolding, a new mystery surfaces…

Patrice Ayme’

 

We Are All Martians

The Life Giving Nuclear Reactor within Earth protects us with the magnetic field it energizes. The idea is that, otherwise, the atmosphere would be torn away, as it was in Mars. Or, if not the atmosphere, at least the hydrogen (and thus the water), as happened for Venus.

At least, such was my philosophy of the rocky planets’ atmosphere (exposed in prior essays). “Philosophy” can be educated guesses based on lots of physics and mathematics, intuitively understood. Philosophy can stand just at the edge of science. But then it’s good to have a scientific confirmation. Here it is. NASA’s MAVEN (= Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) in orbit for years, has measured that Mars loses around 100 grams of atmosphere per second, due to impact from the Solar Wind (protons going at 400 kilometers per second).

That’s not good. Still, back of the envelope computations show Mars should still have a thick atmosphere. Instead, its density is only 1% of Earth, and few of Earth’s most primitive lifeforms are hardy enough to survive in Mars CO2 atmosphere (even neglecting UV and low temperatures).

Once the atmosphere was going, the water followed, and so did the considerable greenhouse water vapor brought. Water vapor (H2O) is more greenhousy than CO2, meaning the relationship CO2-H2O is nonlinear: higher CO2 on Earth means higher H2O, hence even higher greenhouse than the simple rise of CO2 would naively bring).

Earth Has A Powerful Nuclear Powered Magnetic Shield. Mars’ Shield Was Too Weak. The Solar Wind Tore the Martian Atmosphere Away MCE By MCE.

So, if 100 grams per second was not enough to strip the atmosphere why did it escape Mars as much as it did?

The Sun is an hectic thermonuclear engine shaken by internal explosions. Occasionally a Mass Coronal Ejection (MCE) occurs. Then an alarming eruption of inordinate magnitude, violently flings material off the sun, in a particular eruption. The last one to hit the Earth was in the Nineteenth Century, and it caused severe disruption to the then nascent electrodynamic industry. More severe ones went here and there in the meantime (sparing Earth for now).

However, one hit Mars, and MAVEN was there to measure what happened. What happened? The MCE driven Solar Wind smacked into Mars with great force, and robbed the planet of five kilograms of atmosphere per second.

So what philosophy to extract from this?

1. Thank our nuclear reactor at the core, which maintains an iron ocean, hundreds of kilometers deep, below our feet.
2. Life is fragile: it can get started easily, but  can get killed easily.
3. With at least two planets where life started, in the Solar System, life, basic life, probably started all over the galaxy.
4. Earth’s life has a very high probability to be of Martian origin.

Why the last point? Because Mars cooled down at least four time faster than Earth. The very latest news show that life started on Earth within 500 million years of our planet’s formation. At that point, Earth became cool enough to sustain life (in spite of the formation of the Moon, which, whether from an impact or from my own nuclear eruption theory, was characterized by great heat, and worldwide fusion of the crust). By then Mars had been cool enough for four hundred million years, at least, to allow life (I get that working backwards from the geological date of life start on Earth, and the factor 4, from the surface ratios).

How did life bearing material go from Mars to Earth? Martian meteorites are found on Earth: an object crashes on Mars and debris flung into space (Mars has lower gravity than Earth). Some documented trips took no more than 15 million years, and temperatures within would have preserved life. More than four billion years ago, the bombardment was extremely intense, and Martian meteorites may have penetrated the terrestrial atmosphere continually. And it would just take one meteorite.

A baby was dying in London, from leukemia. All usual treatments were tried, and failed. The doctors proposed to try an approach so far only experimented only on mice. Collaborating quickly with the French company, CELLECTIS Paris, designer cells made to attack specifically Layla’s cancer were engineered. The treatment was an astounding success, so far. To make war against all diseases is not just fair, it is the war which has to be waged, paying our respects to Mars. In particular, I am certain that, when the choice is between death and trying a treatment which seems to have worked on mice, one should chose the latter. If nothing else, it brings hope, and the certainty one is contributing to:

1. Fighting back (the most human thing to do, facing evil).
2. Science
3. Treatment to all of humanity (other babies, etc.), another most human behavior to engage in: giving one’s life for others.

So kudos to the doctors in London (and the British government for allowing experimentation, plus the two parents for having encouraged it).

Our species celebrates Mars as a god, because war is one of our oldest instincts. Anglo-Saxon media generally scrupulously avoided to mention that this was FRENCH technology (from a French start-up, of all things!). Not mentioning France is part of the war of Anglo-Saxon plutocracy against France. We are all Martians, in more ways than one. And yes, we need to cultivate the better angels of that Martian side of us.

Patrice Ayme’