New Continent Found - Garbage Gyre II - 9

Fig. 1 (click to enlarge)

The graphic to the left shows an enormous area of the Pacific Ocean that touches upon two nations, four states, and one province (British Columbia).

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has, for years, written about this area known to mariners as "The Garbage Patch", known to oceanographers as "The Pacific Gyre," and now known to climate scientists as "The Blob" (Garbage Garbage Garbage, New Continent Found - Garbage Gyre II, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, The Gyres, The America's Cup & Medals, The Blob).

The area I wrote about, in 2009, was full of garbage and debris from civilization as we know it:

Not everyone will remember the song Garbage by Steele and Seeger.

Not many people know about The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

It is in the ocean, and the eastern portion is twice the size of Texas.

The western portion is not quite as large.

Oceanographers say:

The garbage patches present numerous hazards to marine life, fishing and tourism. But before we discuss those, it's important to look at the role of plastic. Plastic constitutes 90 percent of all trash floating in the world's oceans. The United Nations Environment Program estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic. In some areas, the amount of plastic outweighs the amount of plankton by a ratio of six to one. Of the more than 200 billion pounds of plastic the world produces each year, about 10 percent ends up in the ocean. Seventy percent of that eventually sinks, damaging life on the ocean floor. The rest floats; much of it ends up in gyres and the massive garbage patches that form there, with some plastic eventually washing up on a distant shore.

(How Stuff Works). More than twice the size of Texas ... and then some.

(Garbage Garbage Garbage). By now it has had Fukishima radiation and tsunami debris added to it (Fukushima Surpasses Chernobyl ... what? Russian communist radiation surpassed by Japanese democratic radiation?).

Anyway, now "The Garbage Patch" is also a warm-water spot that is said to be having an impact on climate patterns (The Blob).

When sea levels rise a bit more, perhaps some of that garbage will make its way back to the ports of the civilization it came from (Will This Float Your Boat - 8).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Let them eat plastic ...

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The Evolution of Models - 5

Fig. 1 (click to enlarge)

I. Start Here

The notion of building a brain for a machine mystifies people who have never programmed computers, i.e., taught them to think.

That is, it mystifies people who have never developed software, which is the computer's cognitive dynamic that is a lot like the cognitive dynamic of human thinking at some level (garbage in, garbage out).

Highly opinionated people will imagine the wildest of scenarios when confronted with a machine with a software brain that can defeat them at chess.

Or defeat them in a question answer session about world geography, astronomy, or the number of atoms in various elements.

This is especially so when confronted with computers having software brains that are models which calculate future events better than they can.

I want to try to demystify this context by showing some of the world's most simple software brains for computers that can predict sea level rise.

The first one is the brain of a highly opinionated computer, which asks no questions because it already knows it all, so it just spills the beans:

---

#include <iostream>
int main()
{
 cout << "Hello world! SLR will reach 0 ft. in 120 years!" << endl;
 return 0;
}

---

That is the Senator Inhofe model.

The next example is the brain of a data driven computer, which asks a "genius" for data before it spills the beans:

---

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
int main()
{
cout << "Hello genius! How many feet of SLR will take place in 120 years?" << endl;
string slr;
cin >> slr;
cout << "Hello again world! The genius says that [" << slr << "] ft. of SLR will take place in 120 years!" << endl;

return 0;
}

---

The point is that serious software is a lot like serious people: it takes a lot of work to produce, and what they say is more reliable and less frivolous than merely opinionated people.

II. Don't Zone Out

That there are zones where ice sheet or ice cap melt takes place at a different rates

Fig. 2 (click to enlarge)

than at other zones should be as certain as the fact we live on a globe and not on a flat earth.

The zone approach to sea level rise (SLR) software, in Fig. 1, shown as four bell-curve type shapes, with X₁, X₂, X₃, and X₄ as points in each zone.

To reflect reality, "X" represents when CO² in inordinate quantities is ejected into the atmosphere.

The upward slope is the resulting temperature rise until "Y" is reached, which is the point at which ice melt takes place (X₁ = coastal, X₂ = inland 1, X₃ = inland 2, and X₄ = no melt).

That there would be different beginning points for each zone ought not to be too much for anyone to comprehend.

Fig. 3 (click to enlarge)

The zone map of Greenland at Fig. 2 and Antarctica at Fig 3 show the four zones at each location.

It would seem to be intuitive that low lying areas at the coasts near warming oceans would be the first place where melt would take place.

As the ice weakens, one would expect some of the ice to break up into various ice chunks and slide off the land mass into the sea.

Either melt water flowing into the sea, or ice calving into ice bergs causes SLR.

In general, the ice does not have to melt to cause SLR, because when it slides off the land at the coast and into the sea, it causes displacement.

Then, depending on the circumstances of salinity, etc., it may cause a bit more SLR when it melts (SLR when floating ice melts?).

The concept in Fig. 1 shows a melt sequence, beginning with the first zone most likely to melt, then incrementally proceeding to the least likely to begin to melt.

The proof of the validity of this concept is shown by comparing the oft used WAIS and EAIS (West and East Antarctica) nomenclature, with the four zones comprised of natural contours, distance from, and elevations above the warming seas.

The WAIS and EAIS nomenclature is based on lines drawn on a paper map rather than being based on natural configurations of obvious geographical features.

The melt and destabilization of the coastal Totten Glacier @ EAIS, together with the melt of glaciers along the WAIS coast, illustrates the point that they are both in the same Dredd Blog SLR software "coastal zone."

Those familiar with erroneous historical Antarctica rhetoric will remember that the EAIS was considered to be a separate, "stable" place, compared to WAIS, and that EAIS "would not melt" for ages (The Case For A Stable EAIS).

Those familiar with real time Antarctica and with Dredd Blog SLR software will remember that coastal areas of both WAIS and EAIS are not only in the Dredd Blog SLR coastal zone, but that both WAIS, and EAIS are melting now (i.e. losing volume and/or mass).

III. Leave The Absolutes At The Bar

That the zones are geographically distinct (height above sea level, distance from ocean, etc.) does not mean that there will be no overlapping melt, it just means that, by and large, the melt will proceed like dominoes sequentially falling as the ocean and air warm up.

The Dredd Blog SLR model has database values that set dates for triggering the start of the simulation of the melt of each zone, or turn them off, by allowing the user to specify what year the melt in each zone begins.

For example, "Greenland inland 1" can be set to a different year when melt starts, from "Antarctica inland 1" (as can the other zones).

IV. Irrelevant Difficult Parts

A. Why Simplify?

The reason for focusing only on SLR software in a simplified way is underscored by 1 study in 1 city in 1 country, out of 196 countries with more than 4,764 ports (World Port Source):

2.4 Resources Threatened by Sea Level Rise

In any given area, rising seas pose a threat to many different types of resources. Among the vulnerable coastal systems are transportation facilities such as roadways, airports, bridges, and mass transit systems; electric utility systems and power plants; stormwater systems and wastewater treatment plants and outfalls; groundwater aquifers; wetlands and fisheries; and many other human and natural systems from homes to schools, hospitals, and industry. Any impacts on resources within the affected area may lead to secondary impacts elsewhere.
...
3,2 ... Facilities At Risk [@ 1 m/3 ft. SLR]

Schools ... 60 ... Healthcare facilities ... 29 ... Fire stations ... 10 ... Police stations ... 8 ... hazardous material sites ... 208 ... buildings ... 49,000 ... lives ... 220,000

3.4.2 Ports
...
Our assessment of future flood risk with sea level rise shows significant flooding is possible at the Port of Oakland. The San Francisco and Oakland airports are also vulnerable to flooding with sea level rise. In addition to directly affecting port operations, sea level rise may cause other interruptions to goods movement at ports. Sea level rise can reduce bridge clearance, thereby reducing the size of ships able to pass or restricting their movements to times of low tide. Higher seas may cause ships to sit higher in the water, possibly resulting in less efficient port operations (National Research Council 1987). These impacts are highly site specific, and somewhat speculative, requiring detailed local study. We also note the connection between possible direct impacts of sea level rise on the ports themselves and possible flooding of transportation (rail and road) corridors to and from the ports.
...
4.1 Conclusions

Rising sea levels will be among the most significant impacts of climate change ...

We estimate that sea level rise will put 220,000 [people at risk] ... with a 1.0 m ... rise in sea levels ... A wide range of critical infrastructure, such as roads, hospitals, schools, emergency facilities, wastewater treatment plants, power plants, and wetlands is also vulnerable. In addition ... property is at risk ... with a 1.0 ... m rise in sea levels ...

(Impact of SLR - San Francisco Bay, emphasis added; PDF). The real difficulty is not "being able to see" what is coming (it is easy to see what is coming).

(TEST: multiply the individuals in that 1 area who must move, by the number of ports ... 220,000 × 4,764 = 1,048,080,000 ... if moving over a billion people does not convince us, then multiply each of those figures, for each item, schools, healthcare facilities, fire stations, police stations, hazardous material sites, and buildings, etc., by 4,764).

The real difficulty is being able to do something about the impact of SLR.

B. How To Simplify

It should be clear that the progression through X_1,2,3,4, Y_1,2,3,4, and Z_1,2,3,4, is also a progression of difficulty, in terms of determining when each Zone_1,2,3,4 activity will begin to take place.

I have not concerned myself with that too much, because just the coastal zones of Greenland and Antarctica themselves can generate SLR above the 3 ft. catastrophe level.

The model sets SLR potential in each coastal zone of the three locations as: (Antarctica) 10.0265 + (Greenland) 4.298 + (non-polar) 0.27, which totals 14.5945 feet (see Section V for those figures as they appear in the data).

Focusing on stopping the catastrophe by leaving fossil fuels in the ground, and switching to non-suicidal fuels, is the target logic and target sanity.

V.  Example Data File

The following is an SQL related file structure which the mySQL client program processes to create a simple SQL table, from which the SLR software loads its values:

---

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS [sql database name];
USE [sql database name];
CREATE TABLE [sql table name] (
[index variable] INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
[key variable] VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
[data variable] VARCHAR(32) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY ([index name]) );
insert into slr_projection VALUES (0, "[key variable] = ", "[data value]");

---

I include this sample for the simple purpose of showing that changing the data can seriously change the outcome of what the software generates.

Some values have more impact on the outcome than others do.

For example, changing the year the melt begins in each zone, the number of feet of potential SLR in each zone, the degrees Celsius the globe will be warmed to by the year 2100, and the like, can significantly change the outcome.

That is why I choose to use, as the backbone, IPCC projections from years ago that turned out to be correct projections when reviewed for accuracy.

And, it is why I try to improve upon the IPCC SLR projections, which have not been accurate (The IPCC Record on Global Warming Temperature Projections, The Evolution of Models - 4).

VI. The Way It Works Now

I use the "curve", the "footprint", and/or the "pattern" shown by the IPCC temperature and CO² ppm projections, which have been shown to be reasonably accurate.

I apply that mold to the SLR potential in each zone of each location in a manner that follows the upward slope of the IPCC temperature and the CO² ppm patterns, after fusing the two into one trend-slope.

Since that slope is upward, and the recent satellite measurements have shown a significant upward slope, we know not only that there is acceleration in SLR going on, but we also know that the rate of acceleration of SLR is going to be catastrophic to ports around the globe (Will This Float Your Boat - 8).

VII. Conclusion

It is much easier to focus on SLR, leaving out the rest of climate change, instead of trying to construct a software program which tries to project all aspects of the damaged global climate system.

What I mean is that the specific purpose is to alert those who want to hear and know that SLR is a real and present danger.

I am most definitely an unapologetic alarmist who sounds an alarm when it is time not to err on the side of disaster:

A blogger, commenting on the prudence of having insurance, wrote: "[as] far as frequency you could figure that 0.317% of households ... 0.276% of housing units had a fire in the year."

Nevertheless, fire insurance is not only required for mortgages, it is also a custom of our culture to have fire insurance, and in fact even with those very low odds (less than 1%) that our own fire insurance protection will be used in the context of catastrophic circumstances, as a society we still practice "better safe than sorry" insurance ideology.

(New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 12). Not sounding the alarm is toying with the lives of billions of people.

If we must err, it is orders of magnitude better to err on the safe side.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Will This Float Your Boat - 8

America divided by sea level rise

I. Background

From the first days of Dredd Blog posts, I have focused on what the U.S. presstitutes (In the Fog of The Presstitutes, 2, 3) and the junk U.S. journalists (a.k.a. Blind Willie McTell News, 2, 3, 4, 5) cannot seem to McTell us.

The main-money-stream, lucre driven, pulp-word peddlers of darkness are criminally bound to follow the lust for money.

Wherever the plunder of the truth lures them, that is where they will go (all the way to catastrophe for a buck), because they are part of the corruption that is making civilization extinct for the first time, while making the life in the ecosystem extinct for the sixth time (We Are Riding Out The Sixth Mass Extinction?).

II. The Inequality of False Framing

Some things are not debatable in the real world, yet the presstitution trance perpetuates the false debate about whether or not the Earth is flat whether global warming induced climate change is happening because of fossil fuel use:

[O]nce a scientific issue is closed, there's only one "side." Imagine providing a "balance" to the issue of whether the Earth orbits the Sun, whether continents move, or whether DNA carries genetic information. These matters were long ago settled in scientists' minds. Nobody can publish an article in a scientific journal claiming the Sun orbits the Earth.
...
The professional canon of journalistic fairness requires reporters who write about a controversy to present competing points of view. When the issue is of a political or social nature, fairness - presenting the most compelling arguments of both sides with equal weight - is a fundamental check on biased reporting. But this canon causes problems when it is applied to issues of science. It seems to demand that journalists present competing points of views on a scientific question as though they had equal scientific weight, when actually they do not.
...
The scientific method requires objective analysis of all data, stating evidence pro and con, before reaching conclusions. This works well, indeed is necessary, for achieving success in science. But science is now pitted in public debate against the talk-show method, which consists of selective citation of anecdotal bits that support a predetermined position. Why is the public presented results of the scientific method and the talk-show method as if they deserved equal respect?
...
The book argues that of all the factors that have led to this crisis, none is more important than the failure of America's mainstream media. The following excerpt, after introducing this issue, discusses one of the most important dimensions of the media's failure. The book was published before The Guardian, which had all along provided the best coverage, began its climate-change campaign, referring to the threat from climate change as "the biggest story in the world."

(The Media's Failure With the Biggest Story in the World). The putrid lies of the presstitutes render them unprofessional, unethical, unAmerican, and criminal.

III. Global Warming Is Real As A Matter of American Law

Even the Supreme Court is ahead of the presstitutes on this issue:

The harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognized. The Government’s own objective assessment of the relevant science and a strong consensus among qualified experts indicate that global warming threatens, inter alia, a precipitate rise in sea levels, severe and irreversible changes to natural ecosystems, a significant reduction in winter snowpack with direct and important economic consequences, and increases in the spread of disease and the ferocity of weather events.

(Global Warming Induced Climate Change Is A Matter of Law). The corrupt behavior of the vast majority of moneymongering media is illegal, and gives new meaning to outlier outlawliar.

IV. So When Does SLR Damage To Civilization Take Place?

The short answer is "years ago."

I came across the long answer while writing some software for sea level rise (SLR) projections.

It dawned on me what one of the, if not the, most pressing dangers to what we call civilization really is.

I mean, I came across one obvious damage scenario that is near term, not far off, not something that will not affect the lives of most people living today ("Anyone between 25 and 29 is already older than most of the people in the world" - At What Age Am I Older Than Most People?).

SLR modelling software projects SLR of ~1meter or ~3 ft. in the lifetimes of most of the people of the world:

The increasing Greenland mass loss ... can be fit just as well by exponentially increasing annual mass loss, a behavior that Hansen (2005, 2007) argues could occur because of multiple amplifying feedbacks as an ice sheet begins to disintegrate. A 10-year doubling time would lead to 1 meter sea level rise by 2067 ... 2045 ... for 5-year doubling time and 2055 ... for a 7-year doubling time.
...
Where I have differed was not to focus on "doubling" per se, but rather on rate of acceleration:

Notice that the ~3 ft. SLR takes place circa 2042 in these projected 14.87% -> 4.37% and 14.87% -> 4.08% acceleration details, rather than taking place circa 2100 as the IPCC projection expects.

What happens after 2042 in the graph indicates catastrophic SLR, if the current melt acceleration of 14.87% continues for perhaps another decade or so, as it has since 2009 until now.

Like I said though, it should decrease naturally as the "low hanging fruit" ice near the coasts of Greenland and W. Antarctica melt away, leaving only the more stable inland ice.

(Will This Float Your Boat - 5). This (2042) is quite close to "2045 ... for 5-year doubling time" as written by Hansen, Sato (2012) and quoted above.

(The Question Is: How Much Acceleration Is Involved In SLR? - 2).   The gravamen of the issue is not only when a ~1 meter or ~3 ft. SLR will manifest, but what will it do when it manifests?

V. So What Is the Damage SLR Would Do?

The gravamen of the issue is what will a ~1 meter or ~3 ft. SLR do to us: (The Agnotology of Sea Level Rise Via Ice Melt), and that mandates a focus on what it will do to the ports of the world:

"By volume, more than 95 percent of U.S. international trade moves through the nation's ports and harbors, with about 50 percent of these goods being hazardous materials."

(NOAA PORTS, emphasis added; cf. Ports & Harbors). This implies a grave threat far more real and certain than a solar CME doing damage to the power grid:

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn't create so profound a ...

(New Scientist, emphasis added). The chances of millions of Americans dying because of a CME are very remote.

But, compared to the certainty of it happening due to SLR, well, remember the quote in Section II above: "The Guardian, which had all along provided the best coverage, began its climate-change campaign, referring to the threat from climate change as 'the biggest story in the world'."

VI. Most People On Earth Will Be Impacted

The dates, depending on acceleration rates, extend from 2033, 2042, 2045, and 2055, to 2067, as noted above (cf. What Do You Mean - World Civilization? - 2).

In Section III above we learned that most people in the world are between age 25 and 29, thus, at the earliest projected year (2033 - 2015 = 18) those people will be 43-47 years old.

Add to that the fact that many children will have been born by the longest projected date of 2067 as well.

Most of the ports, coastal towns and cities, coastal roads, coastal pipelines, and other infrastructure will be swamped with problems during their lifetimes.

VII. Conclusion

The American people are sensitive to what happens to their ports (Dubai Ports World controversy).

So are the people of some 196 countries with more than 4,764 ports (World Port Source).

The "biggest story in the world" is outside of the cultural trance (Choose Your Trances Carefully) of the majority of the presstitutes.

That is because, among other things, they are the lame stooges of Oil-Qaeda (Oil-Qaeda - The Indictment).

They do not seem to be here (You Are Here).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

The Question Is: How Much Acceleration Is Involved In SLR? - 2

Ports, ice caps, and Sea Level R us

In the first post of this series I focused on a subject new to IPCC world expectations, with regard to sea level rise (SLR).

That departure was due to the incessant underestimations the IPCC's linear SLR models produced, even though other parts of their projections had been spot on (New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 12, The Evolution of Models, 2, 3, 4).

The models need to implement the notion of acceleration, in place of linear growth, when projecting future SLR.

The reasons have been explained by Hansen, Sato (2012) in an update, where, not having the use of Cryosat-2 satellite data, they wrote:

The increasing Greenland mass loss ... can be fit just as well by exponentially increasing annual mass loss, a behavior that Hansen (2005, 2007) argues could occur because of multiple amplifying feedbacks as an ice sheet begins to disintegrate. A 10-year doubling time would lead to 1 meter sea level rise by 2067 ... 2045 ... for 5-year doubling time and 2055 ... for a 7-year doubling time.

(Hansen, Ice Melt, emphasis added). The absence of Cryosat-2 data has now come to an end.

Ice volume loss measurement, as detected by Cryosat-2, indicates that a doubling of ice loss took place in 5 years (2009-2013).

Thus, my SLR calculation was not conceptually excluded by Hansen, Sato in the quote of their paper above (see What Do You Mean - World Civilization? - 2).

I also selected a 3 ft. (~1 meter) SLR as a catastrophic point to watch, and prepare for (New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 12), and hypothesized about when it could take place depending on the rate of acceleration (The Evolution of Models, 2, 3, 4).

Where I have differed was not to focus on "doubling" per se, but rather on rate of acceleration:

Notice that the ~3 ft. SLR takes place circa 2042 in these projected 14.87% -> 4.37% and 14.87% -> 4.08% acceleration details, rather than taking place circa 2100 as the IPCC projection expects.

What happens after 2042 in the graph indicates catastrophic SLR, if the current melt acceleration of 14.87% continues for perhaps another decade or so, as it has since 2009 until now.

Like I said though, it should decrease naturally as the "low hanging fruit" ice near the coasts of Greenland and W. Antarctica melt away, leaving only the more stable inland ice.

(Will This Float Your Boat - 5). This (2042) is quite close to "2045 ... for 5-year doubling time" as written by Hansen, Sato (2012) and quoted above.

Remember how touchy Americans are about their ports (Mohammed Has Dick Cheney Eyes).

The danger to all nations including American ports, according to these projections, is SLR of ~1 meter or ~3 ft. (Ports & Harbors).

I am satisfied that my C++ SLR modelling program is robust and flexible enough to go with the flow of data being provided by Cryosat-2 (volume measurements) and GRACE (gravity measurements).

And there are only 1,176 lines of code, including comments (some modelling programs have millions of lines of code).

The .sql and .dat flatfile database builders add 40 & 65 non-code lines to the total, for a grand total of 1,281 lines.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Dust thou comprehend?

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Global Warming Induced Climate Change Is A Matter of Law

Downtown Tomorrow

The federal courts have a line of cases that make global warming induced climate change one of the, if not the, major ongoing types of litigation in our judicial system (health care is another).

A case in the Federal Appeals Court for the District of Columbia illustrates the point.

By way of background, in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could regulate green house gases (GHG), including carbon dioxide (CO₂).

Not only that, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA must do so as a matter of federal statutory law (in other words EPA has no discretion to not regulate GHG).

In a case containing one of the most odd of circumstances, it was the EPA that had been a climate change denier, siding with neoCon T-Bagger denier types in the lower courts:

Based on respected scientific opinion that a well-documented rise in global temperatures and attendant climatological and environmental changes have resulted from a significant increase in the atmospheric concentration of “greenhouse gases,” a group of private organizations petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to begin regulating the emissions of four such gases, including carbon dioxide, under §202(a)(1) of the Clean Air Act, which requires that the EPA “shall by regulation prescribe . . . standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class . . . of new motor vehicles . . . which in [the EPA Administrator’s] judgment cause[s], or contribute[s] to, air pollution . . . reasonably . . . anticipated to endanger public health or welfare,” 42 U. S. C. §7521(a)(1). The Act defines “air pollutant” to include “any air pollution agent . . . , including any physical, chemical . . . substance . . . emitted into . . . the ambient air.” §7602(g). EPA ultimately denied the petition, reasoning that (1) the Act does not authorize it to issue mandatory regulations to address global climate change, and (2) even if it had the authority to set greenhouse gas emission standards, it would have been unwise to do so at that time because a causal link between greenhouse gases and the increase in global surface air temperatures was not unequivocally established.
...
Massachusetts and other state and local governments, sought review in the D. C. Circuit [... which held...] that the EPA Administrator properly exercised his discretion in denying the rulemaking petition.
...
[Supreme Court Conclusion:] The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

(Massachusetts v. EPA, 127 S. Ct. 1438 (2007), emphasis added). The Supreme Court disagreed with the EPA and the Federal Appeals Court for the District of Columbia.

It reversed the decision, holding that among other things:

The harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognized. The Government’s own objective assessment of the relevant science and a strong consensus among qualified experts indicate that global warming threatens, inter alia, a precipitate rise in sea levels, severe and irreversible changes to natural ecosystems, a significant reduction in winter snowpack with direct and important economic consequences, and increases in the spread of disease and the ferocity of weather events.

(ibid, emphasis added). Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has addressed the threats of "precipitate rise in sea levels" which constitute a greater danger to national security than terrorism does (New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 12, The IPCC Record on Global Warming Temperature Projections - 2, The Evolution of Models - 4).

Anyway, on remand from the Supreme Court, EPA regulations were advanced, and Oil-Qaeda quickly filed more lawsuits to challenge them:

In the latest court ruling on climate change, the federal court of appeals in Washington refused to block clean air safeguards that cut dangerous carbon pollution from the biggest new power plants and other industrial facilities.

The court on Friday rejected industry efforts to block Clean Air Act permit provisions that require large new industrial facilities to use the "best available" pollution controls for heat-trapping carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases.

The ruling means that industries building big new power plants and other industrial facilities will continue to be required to install and use modern, state-of-the-art pollution controls to curb their climate-changing pollution, just as they must for other kinds of dangerous air pollution.

(Court Rejects Latest Industry Ploy, emphasis added). It is the law of the United States that climate change is real, and that it is really dangerous.

The congress acted to pass The Clean Air Act, the Supreme Court upheld it, the President emphasized the point:

And no challenge -- no challenge -- poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.

2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record. Now, one year doesn’t make a trend, but this does: 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century.

I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what, I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and at NOAA, and at our major universities. And the best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we don’t act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration and conflict and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.

(SOTU Transcript, emphasis added). The new crop of neoCon T-Baggers do not know the law or the science, so they listen to the Apostle of Agnotology, Senator "God Is In Cliimate Change" Inhofe.

With outlaw Republican global warming induced climate change deniers at the helm, we are going to run hard aground on the rocks and reefs of reality, then sink like a stone into ignorant darkness.

The next post in this series is here.