The Political Thread

--If YOU ALL are concerned/worried about the Devastating Deadly Extreme Climate Events that have impacted America (and the rest of the world ) in the last few years…

Than just keep in mind Donald & the majority of the GOP are Anti-Global Warming Believers.

In fact they are doing their best (Bad for us Citizens) to do away with all Regulations/Laws that were put in place to battle & slow down these Extreme Deadly Climate Events (Global Warming).

So please, please, please; tomorrow VOTE BLUE for all Elections = Local, State & Congress.

--MORE GLOBAL WARMING EVENTS & DDECE’S (Devastating Deadly Extreme Climate Events) Articles:
11-02-18: www.cnn.com/2018/11/01/australia/ocean-warming-report-intl/index.html

SHOCKING & REAL BAD NEWS FOR ALL…PLEASE keep in mind that Donald & the Vast Majority of the GOP do NOT believe in Global Warming…

(CNN) — A new study has found that the world's oceans absorbed 60% more heat per year than previously believed, findings that could have serious implications in the fight against climate change.

The research, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, suggests that the Earth is even more sensitive to fossil fuel emissions than experts thought.

Oceans absorb 90% of the excess heat trapped in the world's atmosphere, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA).

The paper's author, Laure Resplandy, from Princeton University, said she and her colleagues found that the oceans had absorbed significantly more heat over the past 25 years than had been estimated in a landmark 2014 report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Potential implications of warmer oceans include:
•Sea levels rising faster than forecast;
•More coral reefs dying;
•More powerful storms;
•Increased melting of sea ice;
•Changes to ocean currents.

"Imagine if the ocean was only 30 feet deep," said Resplandy, in a news release from the Princeton Environmental Institute that accompanied the study.

"Our data show that it would have warmed by 6.5 degrees Celsius (11.7 degrees Fahrenheit) every decade since 1991. In comparison, the estimate of the last IPCC assessment report would correspond to a warming of only 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) every decade."

Laurent Bopp, a co-author of the study from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, told CNN the findings were "bad news for the ocean itself, bad news for the ecosystem.

Because the circulation of water in the deep oceans is very slow, the heat that has been absorbed will remain there for a very long time, Bopp said, likely centuries rather than decades.

"Climate change is not only about the next decades to the end of the century. It will affect the earth for centuries and millennia after that," he said.

The findings come weeks after a dire report from the United Nations warned that humanity has just over 10 years to act to avoid disastrous levels of global warming, urging governments to make "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society."

The UN report found that the planet will reach the crucial threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by as early as 2030, precipitating the risk of extreme drought, wildfires, floods and food shortages for hundreds of millions of people.

Climate scientists say rising ocean temperatures have fueled more powerful storms and are killing off underwater wildlife like Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

***11-05-18: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-05/doomsday-investing-in-a-time-of-climate-change  
Preppers like to buy property in remote places like New Zealand or stockpile canned food in their basements in case civilization collapses. They are weirdos, or so I thought until I had a kid.

A girl born in Germany today can expect to live long enough to draw a pension in the year 2100. But unless our emissions are drastically reduced, the world she will inhabit is on track to be more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times – a level not seen on this planet for some 3 million years.

The northern hemisphere's past summer – which followed just one degree of warming – gave a foretaste of what that means: more droughts, powerful hurricanes, flooding and deadly wildfires.

How should we steel ourselves for an environment like that? Financially, speaking, the answer involves thinking more like a prepper.

I haven’t started stockpiling supplies (yet) – but it’s starting to affect some important long-term decisions. Should I have more children? (Probably not) Where should I buy a house? (Definitely not near the ocean).

Will climate change affect a family's investment plans? Almost certainly. Losses from climate change could be large and permanent.

And I'm not just talking about risks to the insurance industry and potentially “stranded” oil and coal reserves that Bank of England governor Mark Carney highlighted in a 2015 speech. Climate change is a systemic problem, and lower economic growth means investors will struggle to avoid this risk.

I'm fully aware that money matters not a jot compared to, say, whether hundreds of millions of people in developing countries are displaced by flooding, desertification, or intolerable heat. Germany isn't that vulnerable to the worst effects of climate change and is rich enough to deal with what comes its way.

1 But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about how climate change could impact returns – indeed it’s something pension fund managers and actuaries are starting to pay serious attention to.

The trouble is humans aren't very good at pricing the risk of long-term calamities: otherwise, people would have ceased buying multi-million dollar condos in low-lying Miami Beach by now. Equity markets are more concerned with the near-term path of interest rates and probability of recession than they are with the melting ice sheets.

But just because the worst effects of climate change won't show up until the second half of this century, that doesn't mean markets won't adjust sooner, and perhaps then quite rapidly.

“Short-term shifts in market sentiment induced by awareness of future, as yet unrealized, climate risks could lead to economic shocks, causing substantial losses in financial portfolio value within timescales that are relevant to all investors,” is how academics at the University of Cambridge summarized the issue in this November 2015 report.

In an effort to quantify such a long-term and variable-rich problem, strategists have borrowed a concept from the world of high finance: value-at risk. VaR measures a portfolio's worst-case loss over a specified time horizon and at a given probability.

It's an imperfect concept, to be sure: during the financial crisis it spectacularly underestimated banks’ vulnerability to losses. But if VaR helps gets financial types thinking more about the risks of catastrophic change, I’m all for it.

So how much of the global stock of financial assets is at risk of destruction due to climate change?

An Economist Intelligence Unit study found that $4 trillion of wealth (in today's money) could be obliterated by 2100 and perhaps as much as $14 trillion (or 10 percent of the total) if the planet warms by 6 degrees.

2 How come? In a warmer world, the economy will probably grow more slowly.

3 Humans are far less productive at high temperatures. There will be periodic losses of infrastructure and real estate assets through storm damage. Government budgets will also be battered by the cost of rebuilding and damage-prevention efforts, just as tax receipts decline.

At some point, society may decide there’s no point in rebuilding, leading to a permanent loss of productive capacity. Hence returns from equities and other financial assets will probably be lower.

The problem is most acute for developing countries, many of which will be among those most severely hurt by climate change.

4 These economies tend to more dependent on agriculture and they lack the financial resources to adapt by, constructing flood defenses, for example.

I’m not confident that humanity will prevent temperatures increasing more than an acceptable 1.5 degrees. Co-operation isn’t very fashionable right now: Donald Trump doubts humans cause climate change (or doesn’t care), and has pulled world's largest economy out of the Paris climate accord.

Even Germany, a climate leader, still depends on coal for more than a third of power production. We’re alarmingly far off the path towards carbon neutrality.

This all sounds bleak, and it is, but there is one sliver of hope. People don't like things that make them poorer.

The more global temperatures rise, the more people stand to lose – and unlike a recession there’s no quick rebound from climate change.

If fears of material financial loss for ourselves and our children can't motivate us to change our ways, then perhaps nothing will.

In the meantime, assume asset returns will be lower than they might otherwise have been and try to put aside more money today. We are all preppers now.

--10-30-18: www.nbcnews.com/news/world/world-s-vertebrate-population-dropped-average-60-percent-1970-wwf-n926061  
LONDON — The population of the planet's vertebrates has dropped an average of 60 percent since 1970, according to a report by the WWF conservation organization.

The most striking decline in vertebrate population was in the tropics in South and Central America, with an 89 percent loss compared to 1970. Freshwater species have also significantly fallen — down 83 percent in that period.

The Living Planet Index, provided by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and included in the WWF Living Planet 2018 report, tracked the population of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians around the world between 1970 and 2014, the latest year for which data was available.

Other examples of wildlife populations that have dropped include:
The hedgehog, which has declined 75 percent between 2002 and 2014 in urban areas in the U.K.
The grey partridge, which has fallen by 85 percent between 1970 and 2004.
The African grey parrot population in southwest Ghana, which has decreased by 98 percent between 1992 and 2014.

Additionally, since 1950, almost 6 billion tons of fish and invertebrates have been taken from the oceans.

“There cannot be a healthy, happy and prosperous future for people on a planet with a destabilized climate, depleted oceans and rivers, degraded land and empty forests, all stripped of biodiversity, the web of life that sustains us all,” WWF Director General Marco Lambertin wrote in the report, which included contributions from more than 50 experts from around the world.

The report highlighted how humans have negatively affected the general health of the planet. One extreme example was the world's seabirds, with around 90 percent estimated to have plastic in their stomachs today, up from 5 percent in 1960.

--10-29-18: www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/weve-never-seen-this-massive-canadian-glaciers-shrinking-rapidly/ar-BBP62lI?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=U147DHP  
Scientists in Canada have warned that massive glaciers in the Yukon territory are shrinking even faster than would be expected from a warming climate – and bringing dramatic changes to the region.

After a string of recent reports chronicling the demise of the ice fields, researchers hope that greater awareness will help the public better understand the rapid pace of climate change.

The rate of warming in the north is double that of the average global temperature increase, concluded the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in its annual Arctic Report Card, which called the warming “unprecedented”.

“The region is one of the hotspots for warming, which is something we’ve come to realize over the last 15 years,” said David Hik of Simon Fraser University. “The magnitude of the changes is dramatic.”

In their recent State of the Mountains report published earlier in the summer, the Canadian Alpine Club found that the Saint Elias mountains – which span British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska – are losing ice faster than the rest of the country.

Previous research found that between 1957 and 2007, the range lost 22% of its ice cover, enough to raise global seal levels by 1.1 millimetres.

“When I first went to the St Elias range, it felt like time travel – into the past,” said Hik, who co-edited the report. “What we’re seeing now feels like time travel into the future. Because as the massive glaciers are retreating, they’re causing a complete reorganization of the environment.”

The accelerating melt of the glacier has resulted in major shifts to water sources at lower elevations.

In 2016, the meltwaters of the glacier shifted dramatically away from the Slims river, cutting off critical water supplies to Kluane Lake – a Unesco world heritage site. Since the diversion, water levels at the lake have dropped more than 6.6ft – stranding thousands of fish from their natural spawning rivers.

Dust storms have begun to flare up along sections of the well-travelled Alaska Highway – at times halting traffic, the result of a dry river bed covered in glacial silt. The events at Kluane Lake are a precursor of what can be expected elsewhere, said Hik.

The dramatic changes to the landscape come amid predictions that the Arctic region is slated to experience far quicker – and potentially devastating –warming in the coming years.

“We’re seeing a 20% difference in area coverage of the glaciers in Kluane national park and reserve and the rest of the Unesco world heritage site [over a 60-year period],” Diane Wilson, a field unit superintendent at Parks Canada, told the CBC. “We’ve never seen that. It’s outside the scope of normal.”

In the St Elias range, researchers have found warming intensifies at higher altitudes – a phenomenon they are not quite able to explain.

“These types of events aren’t isolated to glacial events in the St Elias,” said Zac Robinson, the report’s co-author and professor at the University of Alberta. “We’re slated to lose 80% of the ice cover in the Rocky Mountains over the next 50 years.”