Utopia, you are standing in it!

Listeners to the December 20^th edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘The World Tonight’ heard the following (from 06:01 here) in the opening news bulletin read by Luke Tuddenham. [emphasis in italics in the original]

Tuddenham: “The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor says she will launch a full investigation into alleged war crimes in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories at the earliest opportunity. Fatou Bensouda says she believes serious offences have been committed but Israel has questioned whether she has the jurisdiction to open an inquiry. Our Middle East analyst Alan Johnston reports.”

Johnston: “The ICC prosecutor has conducted a preliminary investigation of Palestinian complaints regarding the situation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Now she says she’s satisfied that war crimes have indeed been committed there. But she’s asked the court to confirm that it has jurisdiction over these areas before she…

When researching previous post, I came across the article in the Guardian on James Hansen stating that “Obama had only four years to halt devastating climate change”. When I finished that post, I wondered how many other similar claims (in the form of “number of years/months to save the planet/world”) were there in Guardian articles.

As expected there were more than the one I accidentally bumped into. This post will be about the first article I found, there will be a follow-up post on the others.

That first article that I found is titled “Ten years to save the planet from mankind“, written by Gaby Hinsliff and published on 29 Oct 2006. Its subject is the Stern report that was published a day later (it is striking how the Guardian succeeds to know what is in a report before it is published). It was initially not really clear…

The image above, supported by the table later on shows that in December ice has recovered in the central Arctic with open water found only on the margins, as is typical this time of year. The animation shows progression of ice extent from Dec. 1 to Dec. 22, 2019.

Most dramatic is Hudson Bay on the left filling in over these 3 weeks, from 445k km2 up to 1214k km2, 96% of maximum. At the top, Chukchi Sea also ices over, from 589k km2 to 933k km2, 97% of max. Above Chukchi is Bering Sea just starting with fast ice, and Okhotsk upper right growing ice as usual. The two places lagging behind in ice recovery are Bering Sea and Baffin Bay.

The graph below shows the ice extent growing during December compared to some other years and the 12 year average (2007 to 2018 inclusive).

Note that the  NH…

The Trump tax plan, which was signed into law right before Christmas in 2017, had two very good features.

• Restricting the deduction for state and local taxes.
• A reduction of the corporate tax rate to 21 percent.

The former was important because the federal tax code was subsidizing high tax burdens in states such as New Jersey, Illinois, and California.

The latter was important because the United States, with a 35 percent corporate rate, had the highest tax burden on businesses among developed nations.

The 21 percent rate we have today doesn’t make us a low-tax nation, but at least the U.S. corporate tax burden is now near the world average.

There were many other provisions in the Trump tax plan, most of which moved tax policy in the right direction.

Now that a couple of years have passed, what’s been the net effect?

In

A heart-felt outcry from an Australian volunteer firefighter who says: Enough is enough!

Rural firefighter’s heartbreaking plea

A rural firefighter has issued a heartbreaking plea on social media, taking on environmental policies and saying “enough is enough”.

news.com.au, November 12, 2019

As catastrophic fires burn across Queensland and New South Wales — with experts warning that the worst is yet to come on Tuesday — rural firefighter Tyson Smith has issued a heartbreaking plea on Facebook.

The post, which has been shared more than 2600 times and liked by over 1600 people, asks how much more it will take before the government acknowledges current fires are the result of a larger issue.

Three people have died in NSW, and 200 homes and sheds lost to bushfires in both states over the weekend.

“How many more homes?” wrote Smith. “How many more acres of destroyed forest and bushland? How many more…

by Judith Curry

Is 3 C warming over the 21st century now the ‘best estimate’?  A reframing of how we think about climate change over the 21st century, and my arguments for 1 C.