“When Jeb Bush converted to Catholicism nearly two decades ago – adopting the faith of his Mexican-born wife, Columba – he explained what primarily attracted him.”
Bush said that the “sacraments of the Catholic Church, the timeless nature of the message of the Catholic Church, and the fact that the Catholic Church believes in and acts on absolute truth as its foundational principles and doesn’t move with modern times as my former religion did.”
His former faith was Episcopalian, writes Bloomberg.
With the Pope’s new encyclical, isn’t the church moving with modern times?
“Welcome to this week’s installment of ‘Don’t Mess with Geophysics,'” states the Washington Post – not the most liberal newspaper in America.
According to WaPo, there is possible destabilization of the Totten Glacier of East Antarctica, which could unleash over 11 feet of sea level rise in coming centuries.
This week brings news of another climate issue.
According to a new study just out in Nature Climate Changeby Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and a group of co-authors, we’re now seeing a slowdown of the great ocean circulation. This circulation helps to partly drive the Gulf Stream off the U.S. east coast, among other roles.
The consequences could be dire, claims the Washington Post – including significant extra sea level rise for coastal cities like New York and Boston.
The Gulf Stream is a vast, powerful, and warm current, that transports more water than “all the world’s rivers combined,” according to the NOAA.
But it’s just one part of a larger regional ocean conveyor system – scientists technically call it the “Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.”
This, in turn, is just one part of the larger global “thermohaline” circulation (“thermohaline” conjoins terms meaning “temperature” and “salty”).
For the whole system, a key driver occurs in the North Atlantic ocean. Here, the warm Gulf Stream flows northward into cooler waters and splits into what is called the North Atlantic Current.
This stream flows still further toward northern latitudes — until it reaches points where colder, salty water sinks due to its greater density, and then travels back southward at depth.
The Washington Post claims that this “overturning circulation” plays a major role in the climate because it brings warm water northward, thereby helping to warm Europe’s climate, and also sends cold water back towards the tropics. This could change due to climate change.
Comedian Russell Brand gives his reaction to Fox News’ coverage of President Obama’s statement that the media overstates the threat of terrorism in comparison to the threat of climate change.
In other news…
The British paper The Guardian has decided to put coverage of climate change “front and center.”
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger: “…changes to the Earth’s climate rarely make it to the top of the news list. The changes may be happening too fast for human comfort, but they happen too slowly for the newsmakers – and, to be fair, for most readers.
“The climate threat features very prominently on the home page of the Guardian on Friday even though nothing exceptional happened on this day. It will be there again next week and the week after. You will, I hope, be reading a lot about our climate over the coming weeks.”
Rusbridger will be leaving the Guardian this year, and he asked himself if he had any regrets.
“Very few regrets, I thought, except this one: that we had not done justice to this huge, overshadowing, overwhelming issue of how climate change will probably, within the lifetime of our children, cause untold havoc and stress to our species.
“So, in the time left to me as editor, I thought I would try to harness the Guardian’s best resources to describe what is happening and what – if we do nothing – is almost certain to occur, a future that one distinguished scientist has termed as ‘incompatible with any reasonable characterization of an organized, equitable and civilized global community.'”
In other news…
Senator Jim Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, walked onto the floor of the Senate with what he declared was persuasive evidence climate change is a hoax: a snowball. Inhofe is the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, with jurisdiction over the climate problem.
The Huffington Post: “Indeed, even on his own terms, the snowball doesn’t make the point he thinks it does. Climate change produces wild and extreme swings in weather. That Washington, D.C., is experiencing record cold and snowfall is not refutation of climate change, but rather one more data point to add to the pile in support of it.”
The British paper The Guardian recently “admitted” that the U.S. president can have an impact on climate change. It is fashionable for the European press to claim that the president or political party doesn’t affect political outcomes.
“Yesterday, President Barack Obama became the first president who has taken a stand to stop climate change,” according to The Guardian.
Here are some quotes from The Guardian:
“…President Obama took that stand from his first step into the White House. He has put into place a series of initiatives that actually give us a chance at stopping the most serious consequences of climate change.”
As outlined in his Climate Action Plan, his administration has overseen investments in renewable energy industries in the U.S. that are creating jobs.
“He has worked on international agreements to reduce hydrofluorocarbons and methane emissions…”
“Even more significantly, he has overseen the plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s new and existing coal plants; the EPA’s Clean Power Plan rewards state-level initiatives to find flexible solutions to reduce their emissions.”
“He has enacted increases in fuel-efficiency standards…”
“And also significantly, the President has achieved a huge agreement with China to curb and reduce carbon pollution,” according to The Guardian.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1st through November 30th.
Weather Underground stated that the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season ended up with below average activity. There were 8 named storms, 6 hurricanes, 2 intense hurricanes, and an Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) that was 63% of the 1981 – 2010 median.
Fox 12 Oregon states that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued their forecast back in May. They anticipated seven to 12 named storms, with three to six of those becoming strong enough to be classified as a hurricane.
Myfoxorlando.com stated that though the season was quiet, the National Hurricane Center was able to use new tools that could improve the track and intensity predictions.
Meanwhile, the eastern North Pacific hurricane season was its busiest since 1992, with 20 named storms.
At some point the U.S. media switched from using the term “global warming” to the term “climate change.” The was likely done to put the emphasis on the change in climate rather than an increase in temperature.
Global warming is very slow and it is about average temperatures. It doesn’t mean there is no fluctuation in temperatures. For example, the average winter temperature might go down one degree from last year – but the average summer temperature went up two degrees. You still have a net increase in average yearly temperature – even though the winter temperature was actually COLDER than last year! That’s because the summer was warmer than last year…
Scientists and science journalists like to say that one of the best ways to tell that climate change is real is to take a look at the changes we can already see: This year is on track to be the hottest ever recorded, and glaciers, corn, and even grizzly bears are responding to the warming.
However, all those changes won’t be enough to convince most conservative climate skeptics, a new study in Nature Climate Change finds.
A growing body of recent research suggests a person’s political ideology, economic philosophy, and religious beliefs cloud a person’s judgement about global warming. The study, which was released Monday, put that hypothesis to the test by analyzing Gallup polls taken just after the unusually warm winter of 2012.
It found that both Democrats’ and Republicans’ perceptions of the warmer weather in their state tracked fairly well with actual satellite temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
However, “for people who said their local winter was warming, the observed temperature anomalies had no effect on the tendency to attribute that to global warming,” says Aaron McCright, a sociologist at Michigan State University who authored the study.
In other words, the actual temperature had no bearing on whether people believed in climate change. Instead, McCright says, “one of the strongest predictors” is party affiliation: Republicans were far less likely to attribute the warming they felt to man-made climate change than were Democrats. Other variables, such as gender, age, and level of education, were far less reliable as predictors of a person’s global warming beliefs.”
In the U.S., the belief in climate change has faced several uphill battles:
First, many people don’t believe the weather is changing. Second, there are some who believe it is changing, but think the change is not due to science or man-made reasons, but rather believe it is because of Biblical End times. Others believe it is changing, but it is due to a natural cycle. Still others believe the weather is changing and it is for man-made, scientific reasons.
Apparently, a huge number of Americans believe the climate is changing because we are headed for the Biblical End Times.
OK, Fine. 