CapitalistImperialistPig

Donna, the sixteen-year old virgin of Hair , became eligible for Medicare and full Social Security benefits this year.

Albedo (fraction of incident light reflected) is one of the largest feedbacks in the climate system. Snow and ice have high albedo, land and water low. Snow in Alaska and western Canada is predicted to be decimated over the next week. That should tend to warm the Beaufort and Chuckchi sea ice, which is already looking a bit fragile. A good chunk of Siberia is also seeing the snow go. So far, Arctic ice looks really vulnerable. Ice extent is already at record lows for the date, and volume is as low as it was in the record melt year of 2012 - but weather still is going to be the arbiter. TBD

The revealing last sentences of Dark Money : As a child, he [Charles Koch] used to tell an unfunny joke. When called upon to split a treat with others, he would say with a wise-guy grin, “I just want my fair share— which is all of it.” Mayer, Jane (2016-01-19). Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Kindle Locations 7202-7203). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Among John "Jeb" Bush's many stupid boasts was his claim that he would have the necessary lack of scruple to kill Hitler as a cute baby. As it turned out, he couldn't even scratch, much less kill, the not at all cute 69 year-old baby Hitler winning the Republican nomination.

... (Still) to western Europe and parts of the northern US. Meanwhile, it's toasty back in Winter's home, in the Arctic. This is not a entirely a coincidence. A ridge of high pressure that normally forms over the US and western Europe finds it more convenient to park elsewhere this April.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer is a superbly written and extensively documented book that tells a sickening story. It tells how a tiny group of the super wealthy, not from the 1% but from the top 1/100th of a percent, adopted the tactics of Lenin and Hitler to seize control of much of the American government and poison the minds of Americans against their own country. They combine immense wealth with low tactics like the big lie, character assassination, and intimidation with a long range strategic plan based on control of strategic opinion makers, a vast network of propaganda organizations loosely disguised as think tanks, and aggressive buying of influence in everything to from local legislative races to the oval office. Many of them have skirted the law or flouted it, their vast wealth enabling them to escape with fines and other wrist slaps. Their aims are radical: dismantling every aspect of the modern prog...

Fernando wanted me to look at this paper: How increasing CO2 leads to an increased negative greenhouse effect in Antarctica from Geophysical Research Letters. I glanced through it, and the argument seemed not crazy, so I decided to see if I could work out a model from first principles to see whether it could plausibly work. Think of it as a three reservoir problem in thermodynamics. Space is a nice cold reservoir, the central Antarctic plateau is also pretty cold (temperature Ta), and sometimes colder than the stratosphere (Ts). There is a greenhouse gas atmosphere lying between the stratosphere and the ground. Suppose the GHG concentration increases. In that case, radiative heat flow from the stratosphere to the surface will decrease. If the opacity increase is the same for downwelling stratospheric radiation and upwelling surface radiation, then the ordinary greenhouse effect will obtain. Suppose, though, that the GHG layer is more transparent to upwelling radiation than dow...