tat tvam asi wrote:This is what's going on here in Florida: https://mote.org/research/program/coral ... estoration
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5E2H9EU130

Thanks Tat, good work.

tat tvam asi wrote: And he's conditioning these corals for adaptability to projected future conditions for a higher survival rates. It's really interesting. So reef restoration is probably something that will work in unison with the idea of carbon mining. Maybe you should try reaching out to Dr. Vaughan because there's a possibility that he might implement these carbon mining ideas and get the ball rolling, at least here in Florida. And from there it could potentially ride the coat tails of the coral reef restoration movement that's already in motion.

Yes, I would like to make contact with Dr Vaughan. I gave a talk at the University of Queensland back in 2015 on these ideas, but got interest more from the mining industry people than from the environmentalists, which I think says something about the politics of climate change.
I agree that conditioning coral for hotter water is a good idea, but at the same time reef managers should be examining if it is possible to stop the reef from overheating, and keeping the dangerous acid and nutrient down. Many people I talk to say that is impossible because the ocean is so big, but I think it can be done at an experimental scale, using the NASA OMEGA methods. If it proves profitable – enhancing fish stocks, tourism insurance and using algae to make sellable goods – then the market will be there to expand rapidly.

tat tvam asi wrote:That is to say there is a consensus that the models are exaggerating the rate of global warming.

The models being stacked towards the interests of alarm are very concerning to me. The more I understand about this problem the more concerned I become about political interests tainting science.

It is possible there is some political tainting of the science. But we know for a fact that the commercial interference in the policy process, including by backing smokescreen science, has been much more severe.

When it comes to science, all you have to do to displace inaccurate models is build a better model. So far no one has one which has put its finger on aspects that were poorly modeled and just fixed them, or, to the extent that they have, the implications for policy remain the same. Increased greening has been built into mainstream climate models at least since the 80s: that is not the source of the inaccuracy.

We know that some of the recent inaccuracy was a failure to take into account the capacity of the oceans for absorbing carbon, especially by acidification, and to moderate temperature rises, especially by mixing. But when you put that in the models, what you find is that we were given a grace period longer than expected, but the saturation point is going to release pent up pressures that we were lucky not to deal with yet.

Similar pent-up pressures are building up in the permafrost, where runaway methane release may result in a surge in warming. It's good that the models were wrong on the high side, but until we have better models we had better pay attention to the best guess we can make.

Hi Harry, thanks for posting. I guess the optimism part is oriented to hoping that our fears don't necessarily come true. Like with the ozone ordeal. I like Robert's ideas about carbon mining.

I live an aquatic life here in Florida and am active in our natural resources, like the Gulf, Atlantic and the Floridan Aquifer springs. I've seen algae blooms come and go in Florida Bay, do to the army corp of engineers damming the natural flow of fresh water from the everglades to the bay. They're campaigning right now to try and restore flow from Lake Okeechobee to the everglades because terrible algae blooms have occurred and have been flushed out to the Gulf and Atlantic directly instead of filtering through the everglades. The natural course and flow of fresh water in south Florida has been diverted for the sake of big sugar. It's ridiculous. Also, fertilizer from the farm land gets into the tributaries and out to the central Gulf causing red tide. I've been surfing in god awful red tide conditions through the winter because of it. Coughing, eye irritation. It's been centered right around Venice for some reason. Right where most of the cold front surf is best on the Gulf Coast.

I want to believe that we can fix these things. The government has royally fucked things up by altering the natural environment down here. And we need them fixed, like pronto! The aquifer has been tainted by septic tanks. Why we allow septic tanks at all with a precious resource such as the Floridan Aquifer running below our homes and farms I do not know. We need to do better than that. We need ole Sam from quantum leap to come back here and put right where once went wrong. lol

But in each of these areas of concern you'll find leftist conservationists exaggerating and even lying to the public thinking that the end justifies the means. And I think we have to do better than that too. That discredits the authentic aim of real conservation. It cries wolf all too often, and the public turns a blind eye. And with Ridley I see how the climate change camp is doing similar. Exaggeration wrapped up with left wing political views seems a good way to sour the public when caught doing it. And it gives right wing anti-conservation attitudes ammunition in the process. And then it's more difficult to accomplish what needs to be done to reverse the damage that we are doing. It's a real mess...

I might be setting up a straw man, but tat's post is a great example that, if we're going to talk about an environmental crisis, we're dealing with much, much more than global warming. Global warming isn't so visible on the local level (part of what makes it an insidious threat), while in the Florida situation we can see the terrible results of choices we've made that are independent of warming.

tat tvam asi wrote: I guess the optimism part is oriented to hoping that our fears don't necessarily come true. Like with the ozone ordeal.

Of course if you talk to Australians, we did not escape our fears on ozone - their skin cancer rates rose significantly, because the poles are where the ozone layer thinned the most. And if we had not done anything with the Montreal Protocol, much more damage would have been done (including, interestingly enough, to the amount of global warming, as it turns out that CFC's are much more potent greenhouse gases than CO2, although we did not know that at the time).

tat tvam asi wrote:I like Robert's ideas about carbon mining.

I do, too, but not his perspective on government policy involvement. By insisting that it must be profitable without any government involvement, he increases the odds that the world will never see carbon mining on any scale, even though it might well be profitable if its effects on the climate were compensated monetarily.

tat tvam asi wrote:The natural course and flow of fresh water in south Florida has been diverted for the sake of big sugar. It's ridiculous.

So, it seems you are saying that government already intervenes at the expense of the environment, if that can make some people richer. And yet some people think it is taboo for the government to intervene to help the environment. I don't understand such a mentality.

tat tvam asi wrote:I want to believe that we can fix these things. The government has royally fucked things up by altering the natural environment down here. And we need them fixed, like pronto! The aquifer has been tainted by septic tanks. Why we allow septic tanks at all with a precious resource such as the Floridan Aquifer running below our homes and farms I do not know. We need to do better than that. We need ole Sam from quantum leap to come back here and put right where once went wrong. lol

tat tvam asi wrote:in each of these areas of concern you'll find leftist conservationists exaggerating and even lying to the public thinking that the end justifies the means. And I think we have to do better than that too.

I agree. In general, accurate information is best, and those responsible for it have to be able to stand apart from what the government process does with the information, at most working harder to make sure the information that matters is not buried.

tat tvam asi wrote:That discredits the authentic aim of real conservation. It cries wolf all too often, and the public turns a blind eye.

In general I am very skeptical of this narrative. It is not as though the public generally jumps whenever environmental threats are demonstrated. I have lived with the environmental debates since I grew up in Southern California in the 60s, and one could not exercise outdoors for more than 30 minutes without getting seriously short of breath. Claims of exaggeration are there whether exaggeration is present or not. If I ever saw a political process that decided objectively, I would be more willing to get excited about exaggeration by environmentalists.

tat tvam asi wrote:And it gives right wing anti-conservation attitudes ammunition in the process. And then it's more difficult to accomplish what needs to be done to reverse the damage that we are doing. It's a real mess...

Well, the good news is that right wingers these days don't need any actual facts for ammunition, they will make it up from whole cloth if no convenient stories emerge. The difficulty is the same as it always has been, which is the combination of denial by the general public, and special interest influence behind closed doors.

I read an astounding exception to this in the New York Times yesterday.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/opin ... .html?_r=0
William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the EPA, was asked to return by Ronald Reagan after the discrediting of Anne (mother of the SCOTUS nominee) Gorsuch, and was shocked when the chemical industry lobbyists told him they needed a properly functioning EPA so that the public would allow them to work at all. It is hard to put ourselves back into the political environment of the time, with Love Canal, a major spill in the upper Ohio River area, and Three Mile Island nuclear accident all fresh in the public mind, and the Cuyahoga River catching fire not too many years before, but that may have been one time that industry actually cared about the public interest. Or it may just have been that the Congress was in the hands of Democrats and they hoped they could get a better deal from the Republicans in the White House.