Replies to post #212775 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[BOREALIS]

Gore on fire: Says humans treating atmosphere 'as if it is an open sewer'



Tue Oct 29, 2013 at 07:57 AM PDT
by VL Baker

Al Gore has been everywhere lately. [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/10/27/2843011/gore-climate-crisis-passionate/ ] Just last week he presided over his "24 Hours of Reality" [ http://www.24hoursofreality.org/ ] project which was seen by millions globally! And without even taking a nap the very next day he gave a talk at Making Progress, where he was fired up, more so than many had ever seen him.

He touched on many subjects:

He spoke about how income inequality threatened the American Dream, subprime mortgage systems helped start the Great Recession, and how the world is still dealing with the credit crisis as a fallout.

But unsurprisingly, he reserved his passion for his signature issue; the environment:

“Now we have, on the books of the large, public multinational energy companies, $7 trillion of subprime carbon assets,” he said. “Their valuation is based on an assumption that is even more ridiculous and absurd than the assumption that these people that couldn’t make a downpayment or monthly payments were good risks for home mortgages. The assumption is that those $7 trillion can be sold and burned.”

“They will not be sold and burned. They cannot be sold and burned.”

Gore went on to describe how humans are putting 90 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every day, “as if it is an open sewer.” That pollution traps the same amount of heat as the energy from “400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs going off every 24 hours.”

This is a man on a mission. Of course he is passionate about climate change but there may be more to it than that. I've been hearing talk about the possibility of Gore running in 2016 if Hillary decides not to run. Nothing in MSM just in the trenches. Hillary is not a lock but it's her call. I for one would love to finally have Gore as president, with a credible V.P. of course. I can not imagine a stronger leader to lead us out of the disaster of climate change.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/29/1250324/-Gore-on-fire-says-humans-treating-atmosphere-as-if-it-is-an-open-sewer

[fuagf]

Global warming could end Sahara droughts, says study

.. the forecast of increased precipitation in the Sahel, in the
first video, brought thoughts of green and led me to this one ..

David Adam, environment correspondent
The Guardian, Friday 16 September 2005

Global warming could significantly increase rainfall in Saharan Africa within a few decades, potentially ending the severe droughts that have devastated the region, a new study suggests.

The discovery was made by climate experts at the Royal Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, the Netherlands, who used a computer model to predict changes in the Sahel region - a wide belt stretching from the Atlantic to the horn of Africa that includes Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti.

Global warming will heat the land more than the sea, leading to changes in air pressure and weather. When the Netherlands team simulated this effect and combined it with warming caused by the expected rises in greenhouse gas emissions between 1980 and 2080, they found Sahel rainfall in the July to September period jumped 1-2mm a day.

Some scientists suspected that global warming might increase rainfall in the region, causing the so-called greening of the Sahara, but these are the biggest predicted increases so far.

Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists say the increased rainfall could "strongly reduce the probability of prolonged droughts".

Reindert Haarsma, who led the research, said: "We were surprised that it was such a big rainfall signal. There is a lot of uncertainty in this kind of prediction but it is possible the Sahara region could benefit from climate change."

Sediments from the region suggest the semi-arid Sahel region, which borders the southern edge of the Sahara desert, was filled with lakes and lush vegetation as recently as 5,500 years ago. Countries in the Sahel have suffered unpredictable swings in rainfall, leading to severe drought between the 1970s and 1990s.

The cause of the droughts remains a mystery: some blame climate change and others say it is down to farmers destroying surface vegetation. Satellite images suggest vegetation in the region has recovered significantly over the last 15 years, pushing the southern Sahara into retreat.

Professor Haarsma cautioned against reading too much into the new results. The computer models were simple and did not include confounding factors like vegetation.

Peter Cox, of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Dorset, said: "This looks like an interesting study. However, the conclusion that Sahellian rainfall will increase under climate change must be considered as highly uncertain. Models differ in their predictions, with about as many showing decreases in rainfall as increases."

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/sep/16/highereducation.climatechange

.. h/t to Sci Dev Net .. Hotter Sahara could mean more rain for Sahel
http://www.scidev.net/global/disasters/news/hotter-sahara-could-mean-more-rain-for-sahel.html ..
for getting me there ..