January 2023 - News - lists.bikelover.org

Climate Change Resists Narrative, Yet the Alphabet Prevails (A to Z): Now F!
by Frack Check WV: admin 06 Jan '23

06 Jan '23

# [Climate Change Resists Narrative, Yet the Alphabet Prevails (A to Z): Now F!](https://www.frackcheckwv.net/2023/01/06/climate-change-resists-narrativ… yet-the-alphabet-prevails-a-to-z-now-f/) [![](https://www.frackcheckwv.net/wp- content/uploads/2023/01/228AB5DF-B26A-4F97-8621-4C897D6087F6-300x120.jpg)](… content/uploads/2023/01/228AB5DF-B26A-4F97-8621-4C897D6087F6.jpeg) (new) Dolls Run Well Pad for Drilling & Fracking in Monongalia County, WV (click on photo to expand) **OMG! Opening Public Lands to Drilling & Fracking Without Restraint!** >>> _Technical Article on[Fracking by Randi Pokladnik](https://ohvec.org/author/randi/), Submitted January 1, 2023_ **The Republican dominated Ohio Senate and House recently passed the Amended HB 507 bill. It now awaits a signature from Gov. DeWine who can veto the bill or allow it to go into law after a ten-day period. The bill was originally intended to address poultry sales and food safety, however, at the last minute an amendment, (134-3853) was added to HB 507 in the Senate. Basically, the amendment will force state agencies to open their land to oil and gas drilling with no exceptions. The amendment creates an atmosphere where citizens are basically locked out of any public review process and refused the ability to make comments on the leasing process. It by-passes any considerations of impacts to the environment and recreation.** Pre-19th century, Ohio was 95 percent forested. Today only 30 percent of forested land remains (8.0 million acres) and only 11 percent is owned by state and local governments. The Ohio State Park system encompasses about 170,000 acres of land and over 31 million visitors come to Ohio parks each year. For many people, both in and out of the state, state parks and forests remain a sanctuary; a place for them to escape their hectic lives and find the peace that nature offers. It also provides a space for recreating, bird watching, fishing, hunting, hiking, canoeing and biking. Additionally, a study by The Ohio State University determined that outdoor recreationalists’ trips bring in $8.1 billion to Ohio’s economy and the sector employs 133,000 workers. **Fracking and all the build-out that this industry requires will dramatically change the landscape of Ohio’s parks and forests.** Who wants to hike through a park with frack pads and fracking infrastructure? Who wants to ingest wild game and fish taken from areas where fracking is occurring? **Since 2005, and the passage of the Energy Policy Act, also known as the Haliburton Loophole, fracking remains virtually unregulated. Who will guarantee that every stage of the process will be conducted in a way so as not to disrupt the state lands that supposedly belong to Ohio’s citizens?** **A[study in West Virginia](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06022011/natural-gas-drilling- fells-1000-trees-w-va-forest-scientists-say/) showed forest ecosystems are negatively affected by forest clearing, erosion, and road building during fracking.** Vegetation death was also noted after frack fluids were sprayed on the surrounding trees. [Peer reviewed studies show that watersheds surrounding frack well pads test positive for the radioactive substances found in frack waste water, which consists of fracturing fluid and salts, heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and radioactive material accumulated from natural underground sources.](https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1890/13032… **[Fracking well pads and infrastructure will require clearing areas (cutting trees and vegetation).](https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1890/1…) This will require areas of anywhere from four to twenty-five acres.** Not only will this fragment the forest it will cause other effects that to date are still not clearly understood or studied. [This includes additional fragmentation that could affect plant reproduction](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16913941/). Fracking can also introduce and encourage the [spread of invasive species](https://www.digitaljournal.com/world/shale-gas-development-promote… spread-of-invasive-plant-species/article/498352) via the gravel delivered to build pads and roads, and in mud on the tires and undercarriages of trucks traveling those roads. Traffic in the region will increase tremendously, becoming a maintenance burden on roads, and also a hazard to local citizens and visitors. [Each well drilled requires approximately 592 one-way trips](https://studylib.net/doc/7349071/known-and-potential-impacts), with a truck that carries between 80-100,000 lbs. The traffic from the development of one well is equivalent to 3.4 million car trips. **The process of high-pressure hydraulic fracking necessitates the use of 4-6 million gallons of water per well. This surface water will no doubt be withdrawn from the local streams, resulting in harm to aquatic organisms.[Fracking fluids contain chemical additives, e.g. friction reducers, biocides and surfactants, many of which are known carcinogens and endocrine disruptors.](https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1409535) Very little is known about the potential effects of the chemicals, metals, organics or other contaminants once they enter terrestrial or aquatic food webs.** **Climate change, the elephant in the room, is being exacerbated by our reliance on fossil fuels.** [Fracking operations release fugitive methane emissions and are much higher than the industry reports. Methane gas is about 86 times as potent as carbon dioxide in magnifying heat related to climate change.](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/fracking-bo… tied-to-methane-spike-in-earths-atmosphere) The aesthetic beauty as well as biodiversity of the forest will be impacted by allowing fossil fuel companies to frack the landscape. Once again, Ohio’s politicians place the interests of the oil and gas industry ahead of Ohio’s citizens. In a word, “fracking”! >>> Randi Pokladnik is a Scientist residing at Tappan Lake, Uhrichsville, Ohio 44683. She was born and raised in Ohio. She earned an associate degree in Environmental Engineering, a BA in Chemistry, MA and PhD in Environmental Studies. She is certified in hazardous materials regulations and holds a teaching license in science and math. URL: <https://www.frackcheckwv.net/2023/01/06/climate-change-resists- narrative-yet-the-alphabet-prevails-a-to-z-now-f/>

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Climate Change Resists Narrative, Yet the Alphabet Prevails (A to Z): Now E!
by Frack Check WV: admin 05 Jan '23

05 Jan '23

# [Climate Change Resists Narrative, Yet the Alphabet Prevails (A to Z): Now E!](https://www.frackcheckwv.net/2023/01/05/climate-change-resists-narrativ… yet-the-alphabet-prevails-a-to-z-now-e/) [![](https://www.frackcheckwv.net/wp- content/uploads/2023/01/BF8873F0-D479-44FD- BEC8-655D8FF442E3.jpeg)](https://www.frackcheckwv.net/wp- content/uploads/2023/01/BF8873F0-D479-44FD-BEC8-655D8FF442E3.jpeg) Since 2016, the U. S. has added over 35,000 MW of off-shore wind turbine capacity **Electrify Everything ~ Let’s try again, this time with feeling** . [Article by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker Magazine](https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/elizabeth-kolbert), November 28, 2022 **BIWF2 is a wind turbine that sticks up out of the Atlantic Ocean** , about fifteen miles off the coast of Rhode Island. **It’s six hundred feet tall, which is higher than the Washington Monument, and its blades are more than two hundred feet long.** I’m on a boat designed to transport crews to offshore wind farms. The captain maneuvers right up to the metal stanchions that hold the turbine in place, so the blades are rotating directly overhead. They make a fantastic whooshing sound that builds and fades, builds and fades. The effect is at once thrilling and terrifying, as if some gigantic bird were trying to land on the deck. “Ah,” everyone on board exclaims as another blade descends. **BIWF2 has one neighbor half a nautical mile to the north and three more neighbors to the south. Together the turbines make up Block Island Wind Farm, America’s first offshore wind operation. A dozen more wind projects are currently planned off the East Coast, from Massachusetts to North Carolina.** The turbines that will be erected in these projects will make BIWF2 look puny. Staring up at the blades, I am looking into the future — or at least a future —and it’s inspiring. BIWF2 is a symbol of what can be accomplished when people put their minds to it. In 1992, the year of the Earth Summit, the world had exactly one offshore wind farm, called Vindeby. Situated off the Danish island of Lolland, it consisted of eleven turbines, which, collectively, produced less power than BIWF2 does today. Now there are scores of offshore farms, most of them in European and Chinese waters. The largest, known as Hornsea 2, is in the North Sea, off the English coast; it comprises a hundred and sixty-five turbines, each so massive that a single sweep of its blades can power a household for a day. Block Island Wind Farm and Hornsea 2 are owned by the same company, which used to be known as Danish Oil and Natural Gas, or dong, but recently— and for obvious reasons — changed its name, to Ørsted. (It also owned Vindeby, which was decommissioned in 2017.) **As more turbines have gone up, costs have plunged; just in the past decade, the price of offshore wind energy has declined by half.** **Onshore wind has grown even faster, and its cost, too, has plummeted. In many parts of the world, it’s now cheaper to put up turbines than it is to operate an existing power plant that burns natural gas. In places with a lot of wind, such as Denmark, Ireland, and western Oklahoma, there’s sometimes so much power pouring into the grid that producers have to pay to get rid of it.** **The price of solar power, meanwhile, has declined even more spectacularly. Since 2010, it’s dropped by more than eighty per cent. According to the International Energy Agency, solar power now offers “some of the lowest-cost electricity ever seen.”** The rapidly falling price of renewables makes it possible to imagine a not too distant future in which the U.S., indeed the world, generates all its electricity emissions-free. Already there are brief periods — on the order of minutes —when California can produce enough electricity from renewables to meet its demand. In Denmark, this happens for entire windy days. (It occurred two days in a row this past May.) **And, once it’s possible to imagine a carbon-free grid, all sorts of other opportunities open up. Substitute electric motors for internal-combustion engines and cars, too, can run emissions-free. The same goes for trucks and buses, ferries and forklifts. Plug them in! Tear out boilers and replace them with heat pumps! Swap gas ranges for induction stoves! Electrify as much as possible. _Ideally, electrify everything._** e! URL: <https://www.frackcheckwv.net/2023/01/05/climate-change-resists- narrative-yet-the-alphabet-prevails-a-to-z-now-e/>

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Climate Change Resists Narrative, Yet the Alphabet Prevails (A to Z): Now D!
by Frack Check WV: admin 04 Jan '23

04 Jan '23

# [Climate Change Resists Narrative, Yet the Alphabet Prevails (A to Z): Now D!](https://www.frackcheckwv.net/2023/01/04/climate-change-resists-narrativ… yet-the-alphabet-prevails-a-to-z-now-d/) [![](https://www.frackcheckwv.net/wp- content/uploads/2023/01/716EB733-FCE2-4469-B45F-1DB2672F48BB.jpeg)](https:/… content/uploads/2023/01/716EB733-FCE2-4469-B45F-1DB2672F48BB.jpeg) Polar vortex brings despair to most of the continental United States **“D” for Despair ~ The Climate Change “Despair” in Winter Storm Elliott** Technical Article by Randi Pokladnik, Submitted January 1, 2023 **Some will use the recent cold weather event to claim climate change is not real and the planet isn’t warming. But, when one looks at the actual science behind these “Arctic bomb cyclones” and the record-breaking Winter Storm Elliott, it is obvious that climate change has played a significant role.** This Christmas 2022, many of us might have felt like we were enacting the 2004 movie “ **The Day After Tomorrow** ”. The movie is loosely based on a theory called “ **abrupt climate change** ”. [The ocean’s thermohaline conveyor normally circulates ocean water around the planet.](https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA469325.pdf) Cold, salty ocean water sinks and pulls warmer fresh surface water in to replace the sinking water. This sets up a deep-sea current that circulates water round the planet. If the belt shuts down, the northern hemisphere abruptly cools while the southern hemisphere warms. [Paleoclimate records from Greenland ice cores show that the conveyor belt shut down near the end of the last ice age.](https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/207427) The ocean circulation stops when higher water temperatures and the addition of more freshwater cause the salinity and density of seawater to drop. A warming planet and melting freshwater could trigger another shut-down of the belt, throwing North America and Europe into frigid cold temperatures for hundreds of years. While most scientists agree that what happened in the movie (overnight change) will never occur, USA citizens witnessed some dramatic weather changes in matter of hours. Denver, Colorado experienced a temperature drop of 70 degrees in an 18-hour period. Winter Storm Elliott affected over two-thirds of our population and almost every state except the South Western area. There were record setting winds and cold temperatures in our region, blizzard conditions in the plain states and feet of snow in the New England area; even Florida broke some records for cold temperatures. Meteorologists say this storm will be a once in a generation storm. **So what caused Winter Storm Elliott?** The [northern polar vortex](https://www.ecowatch.com/polar-vortex-explained-2650399482.html) played a major role in the crushing cold that blanketed the North American continent. There are two polar vortices on our planet, one which spins around the North Pole and the other spins around the South Pole. [We are dealing with the northern vortex which was first described in an article published in 1853.](https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Living_Age.html?hl=de&id=Df… Normally, low-pressure cold air circulates counterclockwise and inward towards the North Pole. The polar jet stream (high-altitude high-speed wind currents) helps hold the vortex in place, much like an old-fashioned girdle held our bulges in place. However, a weakened polar jet stream causes tiny breaks in the “girdle” and allows the cold vortex to seep out of its circular orbit dipping southward. It is like someone opening the refrigerator door and the cold air seeps through your house. [It is thought that climate change is causing a destabilization of the polar jet stream](https://www.ecowatch.com/winter-storm-elliott-climate- crisis.html). Scientists say that the Arctic region is warming faster than any other area on the globe, on average four times faster in the past forty years. As the polar air warms, the temperature differences between that air and mid- latitude air lessens. This causes a “wobble” in the jet stream, or weakening of the “girdle”, allowing the cold air to advance south. **This year’s[2022 Arctic Report Card](https://www.noaa.gov/news- release/human-caused-climate-change-fuels-warmer-wetter-stormier-arctic), authored by 147 experts from 11 nations, tells the disturbing story of the effects of climate change on the Arctic. Some of the changes include: shrinking sea ice, warming atmospheric temperatures, and shorter periods of snow cover. These could all play a role in more frequent polar air intrusions into our region.** So far at least fifty deaths have been attributed to the storm, with at least twenty-seven in New York State. More than 8,305 flights were cancelled and millions of people spent Christmas day without power. The economic impact “will likely be in the billions.” Scientists have been warning us that the time frame for mitigating climate change is quickly closing. [The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in their 2022 report](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/), “The dangers of climate change are mounting so rapidly that they could soon overwhelm the ability of both nature and humanity to adapt, creating a harrowing future in which floods, fires and famine displace millions, species disappear and the planet is irreversibly damaged.” **Winter Storm Elliott proved to be an example of how we humans cannot successfully adapt to abrupt changes in our weather, even though we have access to advance technology. As climate changes occur more often and at a faster rate, we find that adapting to these changes will become that much harder and more expensive. Even more alarming is the fact that many of the species we share the planet with will not be able to adapt but will instead succumb to extinction.** >>> Randi Pokladnik is a Scientist residing at Tappan Lake, Uhrichsville, Ohio 44683. She was born and raised in Ohio. She earned an associate degree in Environmental Engineering, a BA in Chemistry, MA and PhD in Environmental Studies. She is certified in hazardous materials regulations and holds a teaching license in science and math. URL: <https://www.frackcheckwv.net/2023/01/04/climate-change-resists- narrative-yet-the-alphabet-prevails-a-to-z-now-d/>

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Climate Change Resists Narrative, Yet the Alphabet Prevails (A to Z): Now C!
by Frack Check WV: admin 03 Jan '23

03 Jan '23

# [Climate Change Resists Narrative, Yet the Alphabet Prevails (A to Z): Now C!](https://www.frackcheckwv.net/2023/01/03/climate-change-resists-narrativ… yet-the-alphabet-prevails-a-to-z-now-c/) [![](https://www.frackcheckwv.net/wp- content/uploads/2023/01/A7D64FD5-0896-406D-9BF5-02AA417F9248.jpeg)](https:/… content/uploads/2023/01/A7D64FD5-0896-406D-9BF5-02AA417F9248.jpeg) Rational analysis favors a “carbon tax” called a “dividend” **“C” for Capitalism & Climate Change** [Article by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker Magazine](https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/elizabeth-kolbert), November 28, 2022 **What’s the matter here? Why has so little progress been made on climate change, even as the dangers have become ever more apparent?** According to one school of thought, the problem has to do with incentives. There’s a great deal of money to be made selling fossil fuels — just in the first quarter of 2022, twenty-five of the world’s largest oil-and-gas producers announced profits of close to a hundred billion dollars — and still more money to be made by burning fossil fuels to make stuff to sell, from sunglasses to steel girders. **Meanwhile, the costs of climate change can be fobbed off on someone else. To use the technical term, they are a “negative externality.” In the words of the Stern Review, a report commissioned by the British government in 2005, climate change “is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.”** **By this account, the obvious solution is to realign the incentives — to internalize the externalities. If the cost of the damage caused by a ton of CO2 was borne by the business (or individual) responsible for emitting that ton, then the business (or individual) would be motivated to cut back.** **“A carbon tax offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary,” a 2019 statement signed by thirty-five hundred economists, including twenty-eight Nobel Prize winners, declared. Such a tax would move “the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future.”** **According to a second school of thought, the trouble runs a whole lot deeper. Our political system is dominated by corporate money in general and fossil-fuel money in particular.** (Last year, the oil-and-gas industry reportedly spent a hundred and twenty million dollars lobbying Washington, and it probably spent a great deal more via front groups.) **It’s therefore naïve to imagine that policies that cut into fossil-fuel profits will be enacted. And even if they were, they wouldn’t solve the essential problem, which is that the “invisible hand” always grasps for more.** If it’s not more oil, it will be more lithium to build batteries, and if it’s not more lithium it will be more cobalt, mined from the bottom of the sea. **“When it comes to global warming, we know that the real problem is not just fossil fuels — it is the logic of endless growth that is built into our economic system,” Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, has written.** **[Climate change can’t be dealt with using the tools of capitalism](https://youtu.be/Jdaxehd0cF0), because it is a product of capitalism. It can be dealt with only by throwing off capitalism in favor of something else — a system aimed not at growth but at “degrowth.”** “The difficult truth is that, to prevent climate and ecological catastrophe, we need to level down” is how the British environmental writer George Monbiot recently put it. **A third line of thought — perhaps too bleak and unpopular to be called a school — is that, if big change is hard, bigger change is even harder. How are we going to build a whole new economic system if we can’t even enact a carbon tax?** #######+++++++#######+++++++####### **See Also:** [Naomi Klein - This Changes Everything](https://youtu.be/Jdaxehd0cF0), Bioneers, November 5, 2014 Climate change as more than an “issue.” It’s a civilizational wake-up call delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms and droughts. It demands that we challenge the dominant economic policies of deregulated capitalism and endless resource extraction. Climate change is also the most powerful weapon in the fight for equality and social justice, and real solutions are emerging from the rubble of our failing systems. URL: <https://www.frackcheckwv.net/2023/01/03/climate-change-resists- narrative-yet-the-alphabet-prevails-a-to-z-now-c/>

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Climate Change Resists Narrative, Yet the Alphabet Prevails (A to Z): Now B!
by Frack Check WV: admin 02 Jan '23

02 Jan '23

# [Climate Change Resists Narrative, Yet the Alphabet Prevails (A to Z): Now B!](https://www.frackcheckwv.net/2023/01/02/climate-change-resists-narrativ… yet-the-alphabet-prevails-a-to-z-now-b/) [![](https://www.frackcheckwv.net/wp- content/uploads/2023/01/C89CC715-C6AF-4B3B-A498-37780F390D56.jpeg)](https:/… content/uploads/2023/01/C89CC715-C6AF-4B3B-A498-37780F390D56.jpeg) Greta Thunberg brings much needed logic and truth to bear overall! **Greta Thunberg Says Most Climate Talk is “Blah, Blah, Blah”** [Article by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker Magazine](https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/elizabeth-kolbert), November 28, 2022 **On September 28, 2021, at the Youth4Climate conference, held in Milan, Greta Thunberg took the stage. Sitting near her was the city’s mayor, Giuseppe Sala, wearing a mask. Thunberg, who is five feet tall, could barely be seen over the lectern. She had removed her mask and was smiling.** **“Climate change is not only a threat, it is above all an opportunity to create a healthier, greener, and cleaner planet which will bene!t all of us,” she began. “We must seize this opportunity—we can achieve a win-win in both ecological conservation and high-quality development. . . . We need to walk the talk; if we do this together, we can do this. “When I say ‘climate change,’ what do you think of ?” she went on. “I think of jobs — green jobs.” This received a round of applause. “We must find a smooth transition towards a low-carbon economy,” Thunberg said. “There is no Planet B. There is no Planet Blah—blah, blah, blah; blah, blah, blah.” Her listeners, including Sala, started to realize that they’d been had. The applause died down. “Build Back Better—blah, blah, blah,” Thunberg continued. “Green economy—blah, blah, blah. “Net zero by 2050—blah, blah, blah. “Net zero—blah, blah, blah. “Climate neutral—blah, blah, blah.** **“This is all we hear from our so-called leaders: words — words that sound great, but so far have led to no action,” Thunberg said. “Of course we need constructive dialogue, but they’ve now had thirty years of blah, blah, blah, and where has that led us?”** **Five countries are responsible for over half of all historical CO2 emissions, namely United States, China, Russia, Germany and the United Kingdom. About a hundred and ninety countries are responsible for the other half.** **It was thirty years ago that the world’s “so-called leaders” gathered in Rio de Janeiro for the so-called Earth Summit.** Everyone agreed that radical change was needed. To avert disaster, global CO2 emissions, which were then running at around twenty-two billion metric tons a year, would have to be reduced, eventually almost to zero. How this would happen, no one really knew. **Still, the goal of preventing “dangerous” warming was enshrined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which President George H. W. Bush cheerfully signed.** “Some find the challenges ahead overwhelming,” Bush said. “I believe that their pessimism is unfounded.” **A follow-up “conference of the parties,” or COP, took place in Kyoto in 1997.** By then, annual global emissions had risen to twenty-four billion tons. After much back-and-forth, it was agreed that something had to be done. **This Kyoto Protocol, an addendum to the Framework Convention, laid out specific emissions-reduction targets for countries to meet.** **“I am both determined and optimistic that we can succeed,” Vice President Al Gore told the diplomats gathered in Japan.** **After Kyoto, global emissions kept on rising, only faster. By 2009, they’d climbed to thirty-two billion tons a year. That fall, President Barack Obama "flew to Copenhagen for yet another conference of the parties — COP-15. “I believe that we can act boldly, and decisively, in the face of this common threat,” he declared.** **By 2015, emissions had increased to thirty-five billion tons a year. At that year’s COP No. 21 — held in Paris, it was decided that, at last, really and truly, it was time to get serious.** “The decisions you make here will reverberate down through the ages,” the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, told the delegates. Nevertheless, emissions continued to rise. **In the past thirty years, humans have added as much CO2 to the atmosphere as they did in the previous thirty thousand.** **At some point during all the “blah, blah, blah”-ing — it’s hard to say when, exactly — climate change ceased to be a prospective problem and became a clear and present one. Since Rio, the Arctic ice cap has shrunk by two-fifths. Greenland has shed some four trillion metric tons of ice, and mountain glaciers have lost six trillion tons. Heat waves are now hotter, droughts deeper, and storms more intense. In some parts of the world, the wildfire season never ends.** **One conclusion to draw from this pattern is that the world isn’t going to avoid “dangerous” warming. Global leaders will continue to gather at COPs — this year’s, in Sharm el-Sheikh, just concluded — and to speak loftily about “net zero” and “a low-carbon economy.” But nothing will change, and, as a result, everything will change. There will be large-scale crop failures. The Greenland ice sheet will start to collapse — it may already be collapsing — and, owing to sea-level rise in some places and desertifcation in others, large swaths of the globe will become uninhabitable.** **This conclusion is not, however, the one that Thunberg chose to draw when she spoke at the Youth4Climate conference. “Right now we are still very much speeding in the wrong direction,” she told the crowd in Milan. “But, of course, we can still turn this around — it is entirely possible.** **“The leaders like to say, ‘We can do this,’ ” Greta went on. “They obviously don’t mean it, but we do — we can do this. I’m absolutely convinced that we can.” Or, as Thunberg herself might put it, Blah, blah, blah.** URL: <https://www.frackcheckwv.net/2023/01/02/climate-change-resists- narrative-yet-the-alphabet-prevails-a-to-z-now-b/>

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Climate Change Resists Narrative, Yet the Alphabet Prevails … A to Z!
by Frack Check WV: admin 01 Jan '23

01 Jan '23

# [Climate Change Resists Narrative, Yet the Alphabet Prevails … A to Z!](https://www.frackcheckwv.net/2023/01/01/climate-change-resists-narrativ… yet-the-alphabet-prevails-%e2%80%a6-a-to-z/) [![](https://www.frackcheckwv.net/wp- content/uploads/2022/12/2E3D52ED-741D-4A83-BAF5-6BB5D2B0F075.jpeg)](https:/… content/uploads/2022/12/2E3D52ED-741D-4A83-BAF5-6BB5D2B0F075.jpeg) Svante August Arrhenius, Swedish (1859 – 1927), foresaw climate change. **“A is for Arrhenius”** . [Article by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker Magazine](https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/elizabeth-kolbert), November 28, 2022 Svante Arrhenius was, by nature, an optimist. He believed that science should — and could — be accessible to all. In 1891, he got his !rst teaching job, at an experimental university in Stockholm called the Högskola. That same year, he founded the Stockholm Physics Society, which met every other Saturday evening. For a fee of one Swedish crown, anyone could join. Among the society’s earliest members was a Högskola student named Sofia Rudbeck, who was described by a contemporary as both “an excellent chemist” and “a ravishing beauty.” Arrhenius began writing her poetry, and soon the two wed. Physics Society meetings consisted of lectures on the latest scientific developments, many delivered by Arrhenius himself, followed by discussions that often lasted well into the night. The topics ranged widely, from aeronautics to volcanology. The society devoted several sessions to considering the instruments that would be needed by Salomon August Andrée, another early member of the group, who had decided to try to reach the North Pole via balloon. (Whatever the quality of his instruments, Andrée’s voyage would result in his death and the death of his two companions.) A question that particularly interested the Physics Society was the origin of the ice ages. All over Sweden lay signs of the glaciers that had, for vast stretches of time, buried the country: rocks with parallel scrapings; strange, sinuous piles of gravel; huge boulders that had been transported far from their source. But what had caused the great ice sheets to descend, carrying all before them? And then what had caused them to retreat, allowing the rivers to "ow once again and the forests to return? In 1893, the society debated various theories that had been proposed, including one linking the ice ages to slight variations in the Earth’s orbit. The following year, Arrhenius came up with a different—and, he thought, better—idea: carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide, he knew, had curious heat-trapping properties. In the atmosphere, it allowed visible light to pass through, but it absorbed the longer-wave radiation that the Earth was constantly emitting to space. What if, Arrhenius speculated, the amount of CO2 in the air had varied? Could that explain the glaciers’ ebb and flow? The math involved in testing this theory went far beyond what was possible at the time. Arrhenius didn’t have a calculator, let alone a computer. He lacked crucial information about which wavelengths, exactly, CO2 absorbs. The climate system, meanwhile, is immensely complicated, with feedback loops nestled within feedback loops. Arrhenius, who would later win a Nobel Prize for an unrelated discovery, plunged ahead anyway. On Christmas Eve, 1894, he began constructing a climate model — the world’s first. He assembled temperature data from around the globe and made ingenious use of a set of measurements that had been taken a decade earlier by an American astronomer, Samuel Pierpont Langley. (Langley had invented a device — a bolometer — for gauging infrared radiation, and had used it to determine the temperature of the moon.) Arrhenius performed thousands of computations —perhaps tens of thousands — and often labored over this task for fourteen hours a day. He was still calculating away as his marriage fell apart. In September of 1895, Rudbeck moved out. In November, without having seen Arrhenius again, she gave birth to their son. The following month, Arrhenius finished his work. “I should certainly not have undertaken these tedious calculations if an extraordinary interest had not been connected with them,” he wrote. Arrhenius believed that he had unravelled the mystery of the ice ages, a riddle that had “hitherto proved most difficult to interpret.” He was at least partly right: ice ages are the product of a complex interplay of forces, including wobbles in the Earth’s orbit and changes in atmospheric CO2. His model turned out to have another use as well. All across Europe and North America, coal was being shovelled into furnaces that were bellowing out carbon dioxide. By thickening the atmospheric blanket that warmed the Earth, humans must, Arrhenius reasoned, be altering the climate. He calculated that, if the amount of carbon dioxide in the air were to double, then global temperatures would rise between three and four degrees Celsius. A few quadrillion computations later, vastly more advanced climate models predict that doubling CO2 will push temperatures up between 2.5 and four degrees Celsius, meaning that Arrhenius’s pen-and-paper estimate was, to an uncanny degree, on target. Arrhenius thought that the future he had conjured would be delightful. “Our descendants,” he predicted, would live happier lives “under a warmer sky.” The prospect was, in any event, distant; doubling atmospheric CO2 would, he reckoned, take humanity three thousand years. It’s easy now to poke fun at Arrhenius for his sunniness. The doubling threshold could be reached within decades, and the results are apt to be disastrous. But who among us is any different? Here we all are, watching things fall apart. And yet, deep down, we don’t believe it. URL: <https://www.frackcheckwv.net/2023/01/01/climate-change-resists- narrative-yet-the-alphabet-prevails-%e2%80%a6-a-to-z/>

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News January 2023