Arquivo da tag: Previsão

Geoengineering proposal may backfire: Ocean pipes ‘not cool,’ would end up warming climate (Science Daily)

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Date: March 19, 2015

Source: Carnegie Institution

Summary: There are a variety of proposals that involve using vertical ocean pipes to move seawater to the surface from the depths in order to reap different potential climate benefits. One idea involves using ocean pipes to facilitate direct physical cooling of the surface ocean by replacing warm surface ocean waters with colder, deeper waters. New research shows that these pipes could actually increase global warming quite drastically.

To combat global climate change caused by greenhouse gases, alternative energy sources and other types of environmental recourse actions are needed. There are a variety of proposals that involve using vertical ocean pipes to move seawater to the surface from the depths in order to reap different potential climate benefits.A new study from a group of Carnegie scientists determines that these types of pipes could actually increase global warming quite drastically. It is published in Environmental Research Letters.

One proposed strategy–called Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, or OTEC–involves using the temperature difference between deeper and shallower water to power a heat engine and produce clean electricity. A second proposal is to move carbon from the upper ocean down into the deep, where it wouldn’t interact with the atmosphere. Another idea, and the focus of this particular study, proposes that ocean pipes could facilitate direct physical cooling of the surface ocean by replacing warm surface ocean waters with colder, deeper waters.

“Our prediction going into the study was that vertical ocean pipes would effectively cool the Earth and remain effective for many centuries,” said Ken Caldeira, one of the three co-authors.

The team, which also included lead author Lester Kwiatkowski as well as Katharine Ricke, configured a model to test this idea and what they found surprised them. The model mimicked the ocean-water movement of ocean pipes if they were applied globally reaching to a depth of about a kilometer (just over half a mile). The model simulated the motion created by an idealized version of ocean pipes, not specific pipes. As such the model does not include real spacing of pipes, nor does it calculate how much energy they would require.

Their simulations showed that while global temperatures could be cooled by ocean pipe systems in the short term, warming would actually start to increase just 50 years after the pipes go into use. Their model showed that vertical movement of ocean water resulted in a decrease of clouds over the ocean and a loss of sea-ice.

Colder air is denser than warm air. Because of this, the air over the ocean surface that has been cooled by water from the depths has a higher atmospheric pressure than the air over land. The cool air over the ocean sinks downward reducing cloud formation over the ocean. Since more of the planet is covered with water than land, this would result in less cloud cover overall, which means that more of the Sun’s rays are absorbed by Earth, rather than being reflected back into space by clouds.

Water mixing caused by ocean pipes would also bring sea ice into contact with warmer waters, resulting in melting. What’s more, this would further decrease the reflection of the Sun’s radiation, which bounces off ice as well as clouds.

After 60 years, the pipes would cause an increase in global temperature of up to 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2degrees Fahrenheit). Over several centuries, the pipes put the Earth on a warming trend towards a temperature increase of 8.5 degrees Celsius (15.3 degrees Fahrenheit).

“I cannot envisage any scenario in which a large scale global implementation of ocean pipes would be advisable,” Kwiatkowski said. “In fact, our study shows it could exacerbate long-term warming and is therefore highly inadvisable at global scales.”

The authors do say, however, that ocean pipes might be useful on a small scale to help aerate ocean dead zones.

Journal Reference:

  1. Lester Kwiatkowski, Katharine L Ricke and Ken Caldeira. Atmospheric consequences of disruption of the ocean thermocline. Environmental Research Letters, 2015 DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/034016

Welcome to Global Warming’s Terrifying New Era (Slate)

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By Eric Holthaus

19 March 2015

466467728-in-this-handout-image-provided-by-unicef-the-storm

Storm damage in Port Vila, Vanuatu. Photo by UNICEF via Getty Images

On Wednesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announcedthat Earth’s global temperature for February was among the hottest ever measured. So far, 2015 is tracking above record-warm 2014—which, when combined with the newly resurgent El Niño, means we’re on pace for another hottest year in history.

In addition to the just-completed warmest winter on record globally (despite the brutal cold and record snow in the eastern U.S.), new data on Thursday from the National Snow and Ice Data Center show that this year’s peak Arctic sea ice reached its lowest ever maximum extent, thanks to “an unusual configuration of the jet stream” that greatly warmed the Pacific Ocean near Alaska.

But here’s the most upsetting news. It’s been exactly 30 years since the last time the world was briefly cooler than its 20th-century average. Every single month since February 1985 has been hotter than the long-term average—that’s 360 consecutive months.

More than just being a round number, the 30-year streak has deeper significance. In climatology, a continuous 30-year stretch of data is traditionally what’s used to define what’s “normal” for a given location. In a very real way, we can now say that for our given location—the planet Earth—global warming is now “normal.” Forget debating—our climate has officially changed.

This 30-year streak should change the way we think and talk about this issue. We’ve entered a new era in which global warming is a defining characteristic and a fundamental driver of what it means to be an inhabitant of planet Earth. We should treat it that way. For those who care about the climate, that may mean de-emphasizing statistics and science and beginning to talk more confidently about the moral implications of continuing on our current path.

Since disasters disproportionately impact the poor, climate change is increasingly an important economic and social justice issue. The pope will visit the United States later this year as part of a broader campaign by the Vatican to directly influence the outcome of this year’s global climate negotiations in Paris—recent polling data show his message may be resonating, especially with political conservatives and nonscience types. Two-thirds of Americans now believe that world leaders are morally obligated to take steps to reduce carbon.

Scientists and journalists have debated the connection between extreme weather and global warming for years, but what’s happening now is different. Since weather impacts virtually every facet of our lives (at least in a small way), and since climate change is affecting weather at every point in the globe every day (at least in a small way), that makes it at the same time incredibly difficult to study and incredibly important. Formal attribution studies that attempt to scientifically tease out whether global warming “caused” individual events are shortsighted and miss the point. It’s time for a change in tack. The better question to ask is: How do we as a civilization collectively tackle the weather extremes we already face?

In the aftermath of the nearly unprecedented power and destructive force of Cyclone Pam’s landfall in the remote Pacific island nation of Vanuatu—where survivors were forced to drink saltwater—emerges perhaps the best recent example I’ve seen of a government acknowledging this changed climate in a scientifically sound way:

Cyclone Pam is a consequence of climate change since all weather is affected by the planet’s now considerably warmer climate. The spate of extreme storms over the past decade—of which Pam is the latest—is entirely consistent in science with the hottest ever decade on record.

The statement was from the government of the Philippines, the previous country to suffer a direct strike by a Category 5 cyclone—Haiyan in 2013. As chair of the Climate Vulnerable Forum negotiating bloc, the Philippines also called for a strengthening of ambition in the run-up to this year’s global climate agreement in Paris.

The cost of disasters of all types is rising around the globe as population and wealth increase and storms become more fierce. This week in Japan, 187 countries agreed on a comprehensive plan to reduce loss of life from disasters as well as their financial impact. However, the disaster deal is nonbinding and won’t provide support to the most vulnerable countries.

Combining weather statistics and photos of devastated tropical islands with discussions of political and economic winners and losers is increasingly necessary as climate change enters a new era. We’re no longer describing the problem. We’re telling the story of how humanity reacts to this new normal.

As the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger, in an editorial kickoff of his newspaper’s newly heightened focus on climate, said, “the mainstream argument has moved on.” What’s coming next isn’t certain, but it’s likely to be much more visceral and real than steadily upward sloping lines on a graph.

A Major Surge in Atmospheric Warming Is Probably Coming in the Next Five Years (Motherboard)

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Written by NAFEEZ AHMED

March 2, 2015 // 08:25 PM CET

Forget the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming—new research says we might be in for an era of deeply accelerated heating.

While the rate of atmospheric warming in recent years has, indeed, slowed due to various natural weather cycles—hence the skeptics’ droning on about “pauses”—global warming, as a whole, has not stopped. Far from it. It’s actually sped up, dramatically, as excess heat has absorbed into the oceans. We’ve only begun to realize the extent of this phenomenon in recent years, after scientists developed new technologies capable of measuring ocean temperatures with a depth and precision that was previously lacking.

In 2011, a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tallied up the total warming data from land, air, ice, and the oceans. In 2012, the lead author of that study, oceanographer John Church, updated his research. What Church found was shocking: in recent decades, climate change has been adding on average around 125 trillion Joules of heat energy to the oceans per second.

How to convey this extraordinary fact? His team came up with an analogy: it was roughly the same amount of energy that would be released by the detonation of two atomic bombs the size dropped on Hiroshima. In other words, these scientists found that anthropogenic climate is warming the oceans at a rate equivalent to around two Hiroshima bombs per second. But as new data came in, the situation has looked worse: over the last 17 years, the rate of warming has doubled to about four bombs per second. In 2013, the rate of warming tripled to become equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs every second.

So not only is warming intensifying, it is also accelerating. By burning fossil fuels, humans are effectively detonating 378 million atomic bombs in the oceans each year—this, along with the ocean’s over-absorption of carbon dioxide, has fuelled ocean acidification, and now threatens the entire marine food chain as well as animals who feed on marine species. Like, er, many humans.

According to a new paper from a crack team of climate scientists, a key reason that the oceans are absorbing all this heat in recent decades so well (thus masking the extent of global warming by allowing atmospheric average temperatures to heat more slowly), is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), an El Nino-like weather pattern that can last anywhere between 15-30 years.

In its previous positive phase, which ran from around 1977 to 1998, the PDO meant the oceans would absorb less heat, thus operating as an accelerator on atmospheric temperatures. Since 1998, the PDO has been in a largely negative phase, during which the oceans absorb more heat from the atmosphere.

Such decadal ocean cycles have broken down recently, and become more sporadic. The last, mostly negative phase, was punctuated by a brief positive phase that lasted 3 years between 2002 and 2005. The authors of the new study, Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, University of Minnesota geologist Byron Steinman, and Penn State meteorologist Sonya Miller, point out that the PDO, as well as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), have thus played a major role in temporarily dampening atmospheric warming.

“In other words, the ‘slowdown’ is fleeting and will likely soon disappear.”

So what has happened? During this period, Mann and his team show, there has been increased “heat burial” in the Pacific ocean, that is, a greater absorption of all that heat equivalent to hundreds of millions of Hiroshimas. For some, this has created the false impression, solely from looking at global average surface air temperatures, of a ‘pause’ in warming. But as Mann said, the combination of the AMO and PDO “likely offset anthropogenic warming over the past decade.”

Therefore, the “pause” doesn’t really exist, and instead is an artifact of the limitations of our different measuring instruments.

“The ‘false pause’ is explained in part by cooling in the Pacific ocean over the past one-to-two decades,” Mann told me, “but that is likely to reverse soon: in other words, the ‘slowdown’ is fleeting and will likely soon disappear.”

The disappearance of the ‘slowdown’ will, in tangible terms, mean that the oceans will absorb less atmospheric heat. While all the accumulated ocean heat “is certainly not going to pop back out,” NASA’s chief climate scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt told me, it is likely to mean that less atmospheric heat will end up being absorbed. “Ocean cycles can modulate the uptake of anthropogenic heat, as some have speculated for the last decade or so, but… net flux is still going to be going into the ocean.”

According to Mann and his team, at some point, this will manifest as an acceleration in the rise of global average surface air temperatures. In their Science study, they observe: “Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.”

So at some point in the near future, the PDO will switch from its current negative phase back to positive, reducing the capacity of the oceans to accumulate heat from the atmosphere. That positive phase of the PDO will therefore see a rapid rise in global surface air temperatures, as the oceans’ capacity to absorb all those Hiroshima bomb equivalents declines—and leaves it to accumulate in our skies. In other words, after years of slower-than-expected warming, we may suddenly feel the heat.

So when will that happen? No one knows for sure, but at the end of last year, signs emerged that the phase shift to a positive PDO could be happening right now.

In the five months before November 2014, measures of surface temperature differences in the Pacific shifted to positive, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This is the longest such positive shift detected in about 12 years. Although too soon to determine for sure whether this is, indeed, the beginning of the PDO’s switch to a new positive phase, this interpretation is consistent with current temperature variations, which during a positive PDO phase should be relatively warm in the tropical Pacific and relatively cool in regions north of about 20 degrees latitude.

In January 2015, further signs emerged that the PDO is right now in transition to a new warm phase. “Global warming is about the get a boost,” ventured meteorologist Eric Holthaus. Recent data including California’s intensifying drought and sightings of tropical fish off the Alaskan coast “are further evidence of unusual ocean warming,” suggesting that a PDO transition “may already be underway a new warm phase.”

While it’s still not clear whether the PDO is really shifting into a new phase just yet, when it does, it won’t be good. Scientists from the UK Met Office’s Hadley Center led by Dr. Chris Roberts of the Oceans and Cryosphere Group estimate in a new paper in Nature that there is an 85 percent chance the faux ‘pause’ will end in the next five years, followed by a burst of warming likely to consist of a decade or so of warm ocean oscillations.

Roberts and his team found that a “slow down” period is usually (60 percent of the time) followed by rapid warming at twice the background rate for at least five years, and potentially longer. And mostly, this warming would be concentrated in the Arctic, a region where temperatures are already higher than the global average, and which is widely recognized to be a barometer of the health of the global climate due to how Arctic changes dramatically alter trends elsewhere. Recent extreme weather events around the world have been attributed to the melting Arctic ice sheets and the impact on ocean circulations and jet streams.

What this means, if the UK Met Office is right, is that we probably have five years (likely less) before we witness a supercharged surge of rapid global warming that could last a decade, further destabilizing the climate system in deeply unpredictable ways.

California’s terrifying climate forecast: It could face droughts nearly every year (Washington Post)

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By Darryl Fears

March 2 2015

A paddleboarder floats in Shasta Lake in Lakehead, Calif. As the severe drought in California continues for a third straight year, water levels in the state’s lakes and reservoirs are reaching historic lows. Shasta Lake is about 30 percent of its total capacity, the lowest it has been since 1977. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Not long ago, scientists at NASA and two major universities warned of an inevitable “megadrought” that will parch the southwestern United States for 35 years, starting around 2050. By then, a new study says, Californians should be fairly accustomed to long, harsh and dry conditions.

Over the past 15 years, temperatures have been rising in the Golden State, resulting in annual periods of extreme and blazing heat, while the cycle of low and moderate precipitation cycles have not changed since 1977. That means that it’s far more likely that extreme heat years will coincide with dry years.

[NASA: A ‘megadrought’ will grip U.S. in the coming decades]

That’s a recipe for drought, the authors said. Mix searing heat with little to no rain and snow, then bake.

Unlike other climate studies that sound an alarm for impact far into the future, the Stanford University study led by associate professor Noah Diffenbaugh pored through historical data from the U.S. National Climatic Data Center to explain current conditionsand concluded that California should get used to it. It was published Monday afternoon in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Irrigation water runs along the dried-up ditch to provide water for the rice fields in Richvale, Calif. (AP/Jae C. Hong)

Diffenbaugh and two graduate students at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy an Environmental Sciences explored the role temperature has played in California’s drought for 120 years. Between 1896 and 1994, climate patterns in the state created a 50 percent chance that a year of extremely warm temperatures would merge with a year of moderately dry conditions. But between 1995 and 2014, extreme temperature years were so common that their chance of combining with dry years increased to 80 percent.

The forecast is negative, but not necessarily the outlook, the authors said. California has opportunities to manage its risks with smart water policies that use precipitation to bank ground water so that farms, which use 77 percent of the state’s water, can survive. The statewide water use is similar to what it was 40 years ago, meaning that even though the population has exploded to 33 million, Californians share about as much water now as they did in the 1970s.

State officials can learn from advanced water management practices already in use in the Middle East in nations such as Saudi Arabia and Israel.

“California was already on the cusp, where 100 percent of the years are not only warm but severely warm,” said Diffenbaugh, a senior fellow at Stanford’s university’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “When a low precipitation year occurs with warm conditions, it’s twice as likely to result in drought.”

[Tropical forests may be vanishing even faster than previously thought]

As part of the study, the researchers also observed the impact of greenhouse gases from human activity — carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane from power plants, vehicles, factories and other sources — on temperature and precipitation, Diffenbaugh said. Graduate students Daniel Swain and Danielle Touma were co-authors for the study.

“A lot of this paper is about greenhouse gas emissions that have already happened,” Diffenbaugh said. “Really what California is experiencing is the cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases globally. And the United States has been responsible for a large fraction. Historically the United States has been responsible for a quarter of the emissions and the European Union another quarter.”

Even if world governments that are sharply divided over the approach to lowering greenhouse gas emissions somehow managed to reach a consensus, California will still feel the heat well into the future, Diffenbaugh said.

[How dust leaves the Sahara and floats to Amazon forest]

California, the nation’s most populous state, is suffering one of its worst droughts ever, fueled by the exact conditions cited  in the study — record-low precipitation and record-high heat. The lowest calendar year of precipitation on record in the state happened between 2013 and 2014, and 2014 was the hottest year in California history.

Earlier scientific research suggests that the extremely dry and hot period between 2012 and 2014 might be the worst in a millennium, the study said. But even that can’t hold a candle to the droughts expected 35 years from now. Scientists at NASA and at Cornell and Columbia universities said climate models used for a study released two weeks ago show 80 percent chance of an extended drought between 2050 and 2099, lasting more than three decades if world governments fail to act aggressively to mitigate the effects of climate change.
North America has experienced so-called megadroughts before, during the 12th and 13th centuries. But those were caused by natural changes in weather patterns that give megadroughts a 10 percent chance of forming at any time. The harsh future drought will be the result of human-caused warming.

An international panel of leading climate scientists said in 2013 that the planet is warming at an accelerated pace and found with 95 percent certainty that human activity is the cause. The past three decades have been the hottest on the planet since 1850. Carbon concentrations in the atmosphere have increased 40 percent since then, and carbon, methane and nitrous oxide are at levels unprecedented in at least 800,000 years.

“With climate change, the likelihood of a megadrought goes up considerably,” said Toby R. Ault, an assistant professor in the department of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell, one of the co-authors. Benjamin I. Cook of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Jason E. Smerdon of  Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory were the other authors for that study.

After 2050, there is “overwhelming evidence of a dry shift,” Ault said, “way drier than the megadroughts of the 1100s and 1200s.” The cause, Smerdon continued, “is twofold, reductions in rainfall and snowfall. Not just rainfall but soil moisture … and changes in evaporation that dry out the soil much more than normal.”

Leading to the theorized megadrought, California is likely to experience a series of micro droughts, researchers say.

[West’s historic drought stokes fears of water crisis]

A third study published three years ago had similar findings. The research is newly published, but its findings are not dramatically different from similar studies in the past. Beverly Law, a specialist in global change biology at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry, co-authored a study of megadroughts three years ago.
It showed that a drought that affected the American West from 2000 to 2004 compared to conditions seen during the medieval megadroughts. But the predicted megadrought this century would be far worse. Law said the NASA study confirmed her previous findings.

“We took the climate model . . . and compared” two periods, 2050 to 2099 and 1950 to 1999, she said. “What it showed is this big, red blotch over Southern California.”

Dahr Jamail | The “Mega-Drought Future,” the Disappearance of Coral Reefs and the Unwillingness to Listen (Truthout)

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Monday, 02 March 2015 00:00

By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report 

Since 2011, destruction of the oceans has not only continued, but it has increased dramatically. A World Resources report states that all coral reefs will be gone by 2050 "if no actions are taken," a study published in BioScience states that oysters are already "functionally extinct" since their populations are decimated by overharvesting and disease, and the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, and others around the globe, continue to break size records. (Photo via Shutterstock)

Since 2011, destruction of the oceans has not only continued, but it has increased dramatically. (Photo: Dead Coral Reef via Shutterstock)

Scientists are now mapping a world that is changing rapidly in often-terrifying ways. Climate disruption and world leaders’ unwillingness to act have put us at risk of experiencing mega-droughts, the disappearance of coral reefs and other ecological impacts of an anthropogenically warming planet.

The UN World Meteorological Organization recently announced that 14 of the 15 hottest years ever recorded have occurred since 2000. Ponder that for a moment before reading further.

In what is perhaps eerily prophetic timing, this February marked the 50th anniversary of US President Lyndon B. Johnson’s warning about carbon dioxide. In a 1965 special message to Congress, he warned about the buildup of carbon dioxide and said, in what would become the harbinger warning of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD):

Air pollution is no longer confined to isolated places. This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

The potential consequences of this warming are also multiplying, as witnessed by a recent NASA study that shows that the United States is “at risk of [a] mega-drought future.” The research shows that the Southwest and Central Plains are both on course for super-droughts, which have not been witnessed in over 1,000 years.

To see more stories like this, visit “Planet or Profit?”

In this month’s climate dispatch, we document a wide range of research along similar lines: Scientists are now mapping a world that is changing rapidly in often terrifying ways.

Earth

After the single worst mountaineering accident in history took place last summer on Mount Everest, the standard climbing route for that mountain has become off limits. Many mountaineers, including this writer, credit ACD with making the section of the route where the deadly accident occurred more dangerous than ever before.

Climate Disruption DispatchesAn increasing number of reports now demonstrate that ACD is leading to new disease outbreaks around the world. In fact, many scientists fear that ACD is already creating the ecological basis for infectious deadly diseases to spread to both new places and new hosts as the planet’s atmosphere changes.

Other scientists are warning of a coming “climate plague,” and say that exotic diseases like Ebola, SARS and West Nile virus will become “increasingly common” as ACD progresses. Less dramatically but equally pertinent, recent studies are already linking ACD to longer and more intense hay fever seasons in the United States.

Wildlife is reflecting the changes to the climate as well. Grizzlies in Yellowstone National Park emerged several weeks early from their winter hibernation due to the arrival of spring-like weather, with warmer temperatures and rain falling instead of the usual snow, according to a park spokesperson.

Dramatic acceleration of ACD and its impacts on agriculture mean that “profound” societal changes are needed in order to feed the world’s ever-growing population.

Madagascar’s lemur species, most of them already imperiled, are now being severely impacted by the effects of ACD, which will cause an average of half of their current habitats to be removed over the next 70 years.

Although it’s not as though we needed any further evidence that ACD is real and progressing rapidly, a study recently published in Nature, drawn from evidence taken from ancient plankton fossils drilled from the ocean floor, supports current predictions about ACD, as it verifies what we are seeing today, and where it will lead, since it has happened in the past.

On the human front, a recent report shows how disasters resulting from ACD are pushing India’s poorest children further into poverty and sometimes human trafficking, as parents are displaced.

Lastly, researchers at an annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in the United States reported that the dramatic acceleration of ACD and its impacts on agriculture mean that “profound” societal changes are needed in order to feed the world’s ever-growing population. One example of these changes is the fact that, according to one of the scientists at the conference, in order to feed the planet between 2000 and 2050, agricultural output would have to produce the same amount of food as was produced in the last 500 years.

Water

As usual, the impact of ACD is extremely clear when it comes to water and water-related issues around the globe.

In Alaska, the annual Iditarod sled dog race is in increasing jeopardy, as warmer temperatures and dwindling snow cover are making it more challenging to run the race. Mushers are having to skirt open-water sections of previously frozen rivers, run their teams and sleds over long sections of bare ground, and run their dogs at night because daytime temperatures are sometimes too warm.

In the Pacific Northwest, a possibly record-setting bad snow year is in full swing, as mountain snowfalls remain at record low levels, and forecasts for the rest of the season are calling for more of the same. By way of example, the snowpack in the Olympic Mountains is at only 8 percent of its usual level.

The planet is experiencing “unabated planetary warming” when one includes the vast amounts of greenhouse-trapped heat in the oceans.

A recent report revealed that anthropogenic air pollution in the northern hemisphere is reducing rainfall over Central America. Scientists explained that sun-masking pollution cools the northern hemisphere where most global industry is based. This then pushes the intertropical convergence zone (a rain band that encircles the globe) south because it moves toward the warmer hemisphere.

Researchers from the University of Arizona have shown that melting ice is causing the land to rise up in Iceland, and possibly elsewhere. The result of this could be a dramatic increase in the number of volcanic eruptions around the globe – yet another unintended consequence of ACD.

While it’s no secret that glaciers are melting in Antarctica and Greenland, a recently published study provided new evidence that the carbon from melting glaciers is impacting the downstream food chains and having a significant impact on those ecosystems. This means substantial changes to the base of the food web, changes that will have clear ramifications for global fisheries and ultimately, humans’ ability to feed themselves.

A recent study published in the journal PLOS ONE, titled “Smothered Oceans: Extreme Oxygen Loss in Oceans Accompanied Past Global Climate Change,” revealed that abrupt, extensive loss of oxygen occurred in the oceans when the global ice sheets melted approximately 10,000 to 17,000 years ago. These findings explain similar changes that are already occurring in the oceans right now.

New analysis of thousands of temperature measurements taken during deep ocean probes confirmed that the planet is experiencing “unabated planetary warming” when one includes the vast amounts of greenhouse-trapped heat in the oceans.

Life in the oceans is being impacted in what are increasingly obvious ways. Rutgers University professor Malin Pinsky, who studies the effects of ACD on fisheries, recently announced a study showing species redistribution (having to move to new areas due to temperature changes) of fluke, which are being pushed north toward cooler waters. Pinsky has already studied a similar phenomenon happening with flounder.

In California, nearly 1,000 sea lions have been washed ashore this year in what rehabilitation centers state is a growing crisis for the animals. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials are blaming warming ocean temperatures for the problem.

ACD-fueled drought continues to plague the planet, as the major vacillations between extreme dryness and floods grow increasingly common.

It’s important to place this distressing news for the planet’s oceans in a larger – and even more distressing – context. Now is a good time to recall an alarming 2011 report, in which the International Program on the State of the Ocean warned of mass extinction, based on the then-current rate of marine distress. The expert panel of scientists warned that a mass extinction event “unlike anything human history has ever seen” was coming, if the multifaceted degradation of the world’s oceans continues.

Since 2011, destruction of the oceans has not only continued, but it has increased dramatically. A World Resources report states that all coral reefs will be gone by 2050 “if no actions are taken,” a study published in BioScience states that oysters are already “functionally extinct” since their populations are decimated by overharvesting and disease, and the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, and others around the globe, continue to break size records.

Other water-related effects of climate disruption abound.

The massive snowfall in Boston this winter set all-time records for snow within 14, 20, and 30-day periods, and has been tied to ACD.

ACD-fueled drought continues to plague the planet, as the major vacillations between extreme dryness and floods grow increasingly common.

Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest and wealthiest city that typically has access to one-eighth of the fresh water on the planet, is now seeing its taps run dry as the region struggles to cope with “an unprecedented water crisis.” And in the United States, California’s drought continues to make front-page news, as usual. The state suffered one of its driest Januarys on record, indicating that, without a doubt, the state is headed into a fourth straight year of drought.

Also in California, scientists are seeing that state’s shrinking snowpack as a harbinger of things to come. They are expecting the snowpack to shrink by at least one-third as the climate continues to warm in the coming decades, and expect that by the end of this century, more than half of what now functions as a massive natural freshwater reservoir could be gone.

Indeed, a recent NASA study warns us of an “unprecedented” North American drought, and shows that California is currently in the midst of its worst drought in more than 1,200 years. The study also shows how things are only going to get worse.

Meanwhile, the distress signals from the Arctic continue to make themselves known, in the form of melting ice.

A study recently published in the Journal of Climate shows that the amount of ice already lost in the Arctic dwarfs any of the ice gains that have occurred around Antarctica. ACD deniers had pointed toward increasing ice buildup in parts of the Antarctic as a sign that ACD was not happening, but this study blows that “argument” out of the water. “I hope that these results will make it clear that, globally, the Earth has lost sea ice over the past several decades, despite the Antarctic gains,” wrote study author Claire Parkinson, a sea ice researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Seattle-based urban planner Jeffrey Linn produced a series of maps that show what is going to occur as sea levels continue to rise and major cities are submerged in hundreds of feet of water. They are worth looking at closely.

A study just published in the journal Nature Communications shows that sea levels north of New York City “jumped by 128mm (5 inches)” in just two years. This is an unprecedented rate in the history of tide gauge records. The US scientists who authored the study warned that coastal areas now need to prepare for “short term and extreme sea level events.”

Lastly, on the subject of rising sea levels, researchers recently reported that rising sea levels are already impacting Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the historic and iconic launch pads 39A and 39B are under threat as nearby beachfront is washing away at an alarming rate.

Fire

A recent state-commissioned study in the US projects between a 2.5 to 5.5-degree Fahrenheit temperature increase by 2050, which would bring more disease, crop damage and wildfires to the state of Colorado, along with other states in the center of the country.

To make matters worse, another recent report makes it clear that wildfire season in the United States, which used to be confined to the months of July and August, has grown two and a half months longer in the last 40 years – and continues to expand.

Beyond the US, a recent study in the New Scientist revealed that ACD-augmented wildfires could begin releasing radioactive material locked in contaminated forest soils around Chernobyl, allowing them to spread all over Europe.

Air

A recent study published in Scientific Reports reveals that the forests’ ability to suck carbon from the atmosphere is likely slowing down. The ramifications for this are obvious: With forests’ ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere compromised, the impacts of ACD speed up dramatically.

Climate Central recently published an interactive tool called Winter Loses Its Cool, which allows you to see how daily low temperature projections for US cities are being impacted by ACD.

A modeling study published in LiveScience in February shows how ACD is spawning even more tornadoes in the US Southeast.

Another report – which shouldn’t surprise anyone living in the frigid northeastern US – shows how ACD is clearly shifting the jet stream that drives the weather for that region. This has been evident throughout most of February, where record-breakingbitterly cold air from Siberia wracked the region, along with the eastern half of Canada, with incredibly low temperatures and record snowfalls. It is obvious that something is amiss with the planet’s atmosphere when the US Northeast is getting weather, regularly now, that used to be found only within the Arctic Circle. As global temperatures slowly equalize as a result of ACD, the jet stream is no longer contained to its previous patterns.

January 2015 showed that worldwide temperatures are showing little sign of relenting from 2014’s record high levels, as January matched the warmest records for the month in 125 years of data records, according to Japan’s Meteorological Agency.

Lastly, the giant craters in Siberia that are believed to have been caused by methane gas eruptions in melting permafrost are now sparking fears of the unfolding of an Arctic natural disaster. That disaster would look like increasingly escalating temperatures that cause self-reinforcing feedback loops to kick in, and cause the permafrost in the Arctic to continue melting, hence releasing the rest of the trapped methane.

Denial and Reality

There is some big news on the ACD-denial front this month, as it was recently revealed how the deniers’ favorite scientist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics’ Wei-Hock Soon, has been taking cash from corporate interests – and the documents are there to prove it. He has accepted more than a cool $1.2 million in money from the fossil fuel industry, and opted not to disclose that minor conflict of interest in the vast majority of his so-called scientific papers.

Nevertheless, others who are taking massive amounts of cash from the fossil fuel industry, like the infamous Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), continue to spout onabout how only God can cause climate change.

A recently published op-ed in LiveScience asks the question, “Is it safe to be a climate scientist?” given how aggressive and even dangerous the pushback has been against scientists for simply doing their jobs.

It’s a legitimate question because given the fact that 2014 was the hottest year on record and all the other overwhelming evidence that ACD is in full swing and accelerating by the day, the denial movement has began to reach new heights of lying and propagandizing. By way of example, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s top business advisor Maurice Newman says that he believes ACD is a “myth.”

“We are conditioning ourselves to ignore the information coming into our ears.”

Meanwhile, talk of “geoengineering” as a “solution” for ACD continues to grow in frequency and volume, to the extent that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recently issued two firmly pessimistic reports on the subject. The NAS refused to call it “geoengineering,” however, instead calling it “climate intervention.” The NAS panel rejects the use of the term “geoengineering” because, “We felt ‘engineering’ implied a level of control that is illusory,” according to Dr. Marcia McNutt, who led the report committee.

Another, little-noticed factor that may be driving denial: noise pollution. A senior US scientist recently expressed concerns about how human-created noise is making us oblivious to the sound of nature. Rising background noise in some areas threatens to make people deaf to the sounds of birds, flowing water and wind blowing through trees, and the problem is exacerbated by people opting to use iPods during their hikes. “We are conditioning ourselves to ignore the information coming into our ears,” the scientist said. Along with the fact that the majority of the global population now lacks regular access to wilderness, it is becoming ever easier for people to avoid thinking about ACD, since they are out of touch with the planet.

There have been important recent developments on the reality front for this section.

As a mitigation option, a recent Reuters story reminds us, “Giving more women who want it access to birth control to limit their family size, in both rich and poor countries, could be a hugely effective way to curb climate change, according to experts.”

Truthout also recently published an analytical piece on this topic, noting that there are 225,000 people at the dinner table tonight who weren’t there last night – and that the vast majority of carbon emissions are coming from so-called developed countries, rather than poorer “developing” countries.

In an action geared toward raising global awareness, Catholics in 45 countries aim to send an ACD message through their Lenten chain of fasting this year. In addition, Pope Francis’ scheduled address to a joint session of Congress this fall is aiming to put Republican lawmakers who are ACD deniers square on the hot seat.

Given recent reports and events, let us remember the shockwaves caused in the global scientific community when, in 2010, Australian emeritus professor of microbiology Frank Fenner, who helped eradicate smallpox from the planet, predicted the human race would be extinct within the next 100 years. Believing humans will be unable to survive the ongoing twin-headed dragon of unbridled population explosion and overconsumption, Fenner stated unequivocally, “It’s an irreversible situation. I think it’s too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to do something, but they keep putting it off.”

On that note, researchers at Oxford University recently compiled a “scientific assessment about the possibility of oblivion” that predicts various scenarios of how human civilization will most likely end.

With ACD listed as the No. 1 most likely way we perish, the list goes on to include other possibilities like global thermonuclear war, a global pandemic, ecological catastrophe and global system catastrophe. Only two of the 12 scenarios – major asteroid impact and a super volcano – were not anthropogenic.

Regarding ACD, the researchers believe the possibility of global coordination to mitigate the impacts to be the largest controllable factor in whether or not catastrophe can be prevented. However, they also warned that the impact of ACD would be strongest in poorer countries, and that large human die-offs stemming from migrations and famines would cause major global instability.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

How Silicon Valley controls our future (Fear and the Technopanic)

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Translated: THE WORLD GOVERNMENT
How Silicon Valley controls our future

Jeff Jarvis on Feb 28

Oh, My!

Just 12 hours ago, I posted a brief piece about the continuing Europtechnopanic in Germany and the effort of publishers there to blame their every trouble on Google—even the so-called sin of free content and the price of metaphoric wurst.

Now Germany one-ups even itself with the most amazing specimen of Europtechnopanic I have yet seen. The cover of Der Spiegel, the country’s most important news outlet, makes the titans of Silicon Valley look dark, wicked, and, well—I just don’t know how else to say it—all too much like this.

This must be Spiegel’s Dystopian Special Issue. Note the additional cover billing: “Michel Houellebecq: ‘Humanism and enlightenment are dead.’”

I bought the issue online—you’re welcome—so you can read along with me (and correct my translations, please).

The cover story gets right to the point. Inside, the opening headline warns: “Tomorrowland: In Silicon Valley, a new elite doesn’t just want to determine what we consume but how we live. They want to change the world and accept no regulation. Must we stop them?”

Ah, yes, German publishers want to regulate Google—and now, watch out, Facebook, Apple, Uber, and Yahoo! (Yahoo?), they’re gunning for you next.

Turn the page and the first thing you read is this: “By all accounts, Travis Kalanick, founder and head of Uber, is an asshole.”

Oh, my.

It continues: “Uber is not the only company with plans for such world conquest. That’s how they all think: Google and Facebook, Apple and Airbnb, all those digital giants and thousands of smaller firms in their neighborhood. Their goal is never the niche but always the whole world. They don’t follow delusional fantasies but have thoroughly realistic goals in sight. It’s all made possible by a Dynamic Duo almost unique in economic history: globalization coupled with digitilization.”

Digitalization, you see, is not just a spectre haunting Europe but a dark force overcoming the world. Must it be stopped? We’re merely asking.

Spiegel’s editors next fret that “progress will be faster and bigger, like an avalanche:” iPhone, self-driving cars, the world’s knowledge now digital and retrievable, 70% of stock trading controlled by algorithms, commercial drones, artificial intelligence, robots. “Madness but everyday madness,” Spiegel cries. “No longer science fiction.”

What all this means is misunderstood, Spiegel says, “above all by politicians,” who must decide whether to stand by as spectators while “others organize a global revolution. Because what is happening is much more than the triumph of new technology, much more than an economic phenomenon. It’s not just about ‘the internet’ or ‘social networks,’ not about intelligence and Edward Snowden and the question of what Google does with data.” It’s not just about newspapers shutting down and jobs lost to software. We are in the path of social change, “which in the end no one can escape.” Distinct from the industrial revolution, this time “digitization doesn’t just change industries but how we think and how we live. Only this time the change is controlled centrally by a few hundred people…. They aren’t stumbling into the future, they are ideologues with a clear agenda…. a high-tech doctrine of salvation.”

Nerdnazis.

Oh, fuck!

The article then takes us on a tour of our new world capital, home to our “new Masters of the Universe,” who—perversely, apparently—are not concerned primarily about money. “Power through money isn’t enough for them.” It examines the roots of their philosophy from the “tradition of radical thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, Ayn Rand, and Friedrich Hayek,” leading to a “strange mixture of esoteric hippie-thinking and bare-knuckled capitalism.” Spiegel calls it their Menschheitsbeglückungswerks. I had to ask Twitter WTF that means.

https://medium.com/media/cdbca1fde10ae254ada8d76013cb70b4?maxWidth=700
https://medium.com/media/768d04fe1ece7d6a932de1bc5397c2d2?maxWidth=700

Aha. So must we just go along with having this damned happiness shoved down our throats? “Is now the time for regulation before the world is finally dominated by digital monopolies?” Spiegel demands — I mean, merely asks? “Is this the time for democratic societies to defend themselves?”

Spiegel then visits four Silicon Valley geniuses: singularity man Ray Kurzweil; the conveniently German Sebastian Thrun, he of the self-driving car and online university; the always-good-for-a-WTF Peter Thiel (who was born in Germany but moved away after a year); and Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia. It recounts German President Joachim Gauck telling Thrun, “you scare me.” And it allows Thrun to respond that it’s the optimists, not the naysayers, who change the world.

I feared that these hapless four would be presented as ugly caricatures of the frightening, alien tribe of dark-bearded technopeople. You know what I’m getting at. But I’m relieved to say that’s not the case. What follows all the fear-mongering bluster of the cover story’s start is actual reporting. That is to say, a newsmagazine did what a newsmagazine does: It tops off its journalism with its agenda: frosting on the cupcake. And the agenda here is that of German publishers—some of them, which I explored last night and earlier. They attack Google and enlist politicians to do their bidding with new regulations to disadvantage their big, new, American, technological competitors.

And you know what? The German publishers’ strategy is working. German lawmakers passed a new ancillary copyright (nevermind that Google won that round when publishers gave it permission to quote their snippets) and EU politicians are talking not just about creating new copyright and privacy law but even about breaking up Google. The publishers are bringing Google to heel. The company waited far too long to empathize with publishers’ plight—albeit self-induced—and to recognize their political clout (a dangerous combination: desperation and power, as Google now knows). Now see how Matt Brittin, the head of EMEA for Google, drops birds at Europe’s feet like a willing hund, showing all the good that Google does indeed bring them.

https://medium.com/media/f0c56baea3ff6372b655f183ad451efb?maxWidth=700

I have also noted that Google is working on initiatives with European publishers to find mutual benefit and I celebrate that. That is why—ever helpful as I am—I wrote this post about what Google could do for news and this one about what news could do for Google. I see real opportunity for enlightened self-interest to take hold both inside Google and among publishers and for innovation and investment to come to news. But I’m one of those silly and apparently dangerous American optimists.

As I’ve often said, the publishers—led by Mathias Döpfner of Axel Springer and Paul-Bernhard Kallen of Burda—are smart. I admire them both. They know what they’re doing, using the power of their presses and thus their political clout to box in even big, powerful Google. It’s a game to them. It’s negotiation. It’s just business. I don’t agree with or much like their message or the tactic. But I get it.

Then comes this Scheißebombe from Der Spiegel. It goes far beyond the publishers’ game. It is nothing less than prewar propaganda, trying to stir up a populace against a boogeyman enemy in hopes of goading politicians to action to stop these people. If anyone would know better, you’d think they would. Schade.

A luta pela água em SP (Conta d’Água)

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25 fev 2015

Quem é quem nos diferentes movimentos e coletivos que se organizam diante da ineficácia do governo e da Sabesp perante a crise hídrica.

Por Ivan Longo da Revista Fórum

O racionamento de água no estado de São Paulo já está consolidado e não é novidade para ninguém. Independente da região, não é difícil encontrar casas ou estabelecimentos que fiquem um ou mais dias sem água, todas as semanas. Os que não ficam só conseguem se segurar graças aos caminhões pipa. Ainda que essa situação seja um consenso, o governador Geraldo Alckmin e a Sabesp seguem negando o rodízio, negligenciando informação e adiando medidas para conter, de fato, a crise pela qual eles mesmos são os responsáveis.

Diante da inércia do poder público, a população vem se organizando para encontrar maneiras de adiar o pior ou mesmo pressionar os governantes para que se mude a lógica de como a água é administrada no estado. Do final do ano passado para o início deste ano, uma série de atos, atividades e aulas públicas relacionadas à crise hídrica vêm acontecendo independentemente da ação do poder público.

Para esta quinta-feira (26), por exemplo, o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto (MTST) convocou um grande ato — a Marcha pela Água — com o intuito de cobrar do governo transparência na gestão da crise e o direito universal à água.

Outros coletivos, entidades e movimentos pautados pela crise da água vêm nascendo e alguns deles, inclusive, atuando já há algum tempo. Com o objetivo em comum — o de garantir o acesso à água para todos — cada um desses grupos propõe diferentes métodos, caminhos e soluções.

Saiba quem é quem nessa nova configuração de lutas nascida no solo seco do estado de São Paulo.

Coletivo de Luta pela Água

O Coletivo de Luta pela Água publicou seu manifesto em janeiro deste ano diante do acirramento da crise no abastecimento no estado de São Paulo. Trata-se de um coletivo composto por movimentos sociais, sindicatos, gestores municipais e ONG’s que busca articular a sociedade civil na luta pelo direito à água. Como solução para a crise, a entidade propõe que o governo apresente imediatamente um Plano de Emergência que explicite de forma clara os próximos passos que serão tomados a partir de um amplo diálogo com a sociedade e representantes dos municípios.

Aliança pela Água

A Aliança pela Água reúne uma série de entidades com diferentes áreas de atuação, mas principalmente as ligadas à questão ambiental. A ideia é construir, junto à sociedade — diante da inércia do governo estadual para com a crise no abastecimento — soluções para a segurança hídrica através de várias iniciativas.

Para isso, o coletivo tem realizado uma série de mapeamentos, aulas públicas, atos e consultas com especialistas para traçar caminhos, o que já levou à divulgação de uma Agenda Mínima, com 10 ações urgentes e 10 ações a médio e a longo prazo. Entre as propostas, estão a criação de um comitê de gestão da crise, a divulgação aberta de informações para a população, ação diferenciada das agências reguladoras para grandes consumidores (indústrias e agronegócio), incentivo às novas tecnologias, implantação de políticas de reuso, recuperação e proteção dos mananciais, transcrição de um novo modelo para a gestão da água, entre outras.

Assembleia Estadual da Água

A Assembleia Estadual da Água surgiu a partir de entidades, como o coletivo Juntos!, do PSOL, que desde o ano passado vem realizando mobilizações contra a crise no abastecimento. No final do ano, a entidade teve contato com o movimento Itu Vai Parar, que lutava contra a calamidade ocorrida em Itu, uma das primeiras cidades a sentir mais intensamente os efeitos da crise. A partir do diálogo, diversas outras entidades decidiram se reunir para, em dezembro, realizar oficialmente a Assembleia Estadual da Água, em Itu, que contou com a participação de mais de 70 coletivos, entidades e movimentos. A Assembleia vem realizando uma série de atividades para mobilizar a população em torno do tema, inclusive em parceria com outros movimentos, como a Aliança pela Água.

MTST

O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto (MTST) também resolveu abraçar a causa da água. O movimento, que conta com milhares de militantes e com o apoio de dezenas de entidades, vai realizar o ato Marcha pela Água, no próximo dia 26. Eles exigem transparência do governo estadual para com a situação, a elaboração urgente de um plano de emergência e o fim da sobre taxa em relação ao consumo.

Lute pela água

O coletivo Lute pela Água busca fazer reuniões de bairro para articular a população na luta pelo direito à água e já realizou, desde o ano passado, três protestos contra a crise no abastecimento. Formado por membros do coletivo Território Livre e da Frente Independente Popular (FIP), o movimento defende a estatização da Sabesp e a gestão popular da companhia.

Conta D’água

O Conta D’água é um coletivo de comunicação, que reúne diversos veículos de mídia independente, bem como movimentos e entidades, com o intuito de fazer um contraponto à narrativa da mídia tradicional, que insiste em blindar o governo estadual e a Sabesp pela crise no abastecimento. Com matérias, reportagens, informes, entrevistas e eventos, o Conta D’água vem, desde o ano passado, participando das principais mobilizações em torno do tema e pautando o assunto com o viés e as demandas da população.

Agenda das mobilizações

26/2 (quinta-feira) — Marcha pela Água em São Paulo
Local: Largo da Batata, Pinheiros
Horário: 17h

20/03 (sexta-feira) — Dia de Luta pela Água
Realização: Coletivo de Luta pela Água
Local: Vão livre do MASP
Horário: 14h30

27/03 (sexta-feira) — 4º Ato Sem Água São Paulo vai Parar
Realização: Lute pela Água
Local: Largo da Batata, Pinheiros
Horário: 18h00

Após forte chuva, sistema Cantareira sobe de novo e chega a 11,1% (Folha de S.Paulo)

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DE SÃO PAULO

26/02/2015  09h44

A forte chuva que atingiu a Grande SP na tarde de quarta-feira (25) fez com que o nível do Cantareira aumentasse 0,3 ponto percentual em comparação com o dia anterior. O manancial opera agora com 11,1%, índice ainda considerado crítico.

Apesar de ter subido mais do que nos dias anteriores, o aumento não foi tão alto porque, segundo meteorologistas, a chuva forte que atingiu São Paulo não passou pela região do manancial. Lá, a chuva foi mais moderada.

Representantes da Sabesp, no entanto, reiteraram na quarta-feira em sessão na Câmara Municipal de São Paulo que não está previsto um rodízio de água para a Grande SP. mesmo com as chuvas abaixo do previsto para março.

Fevereiro, segundo dados divulgados pela Sabesp, vai fechar com chuvas bem acima da média histórica. Até agora, no Cantareira registrou 293 mm de chuva quando a média para o mês é de 199,1 mm.

O Cantareira abastece 6,2 milhões de pessoas na zona norte e partes das zonas leste, oeste, central e sul da capital paulista -eram cerca de 9 milhões antes da crise. Essa diferença passou a ser atendida por outros sistemas.

Desde julho de 2014, em meio à grave crise hídrica, o governo paulista utilizou duas reservas do fundo da represa, conhecidas como volume morto. Esse volume, no Cantareira espalhado em três diferentes represas, é a porção que fica abaixo das tubulações que captam água. E, para ser utilizada, precisa ser bombeada.

A segunda cota do volume morto, de 105 bilhões de litros, começou a ser usada em novembro. Nesta terça, quando o sistema atingiu 10,7% de sua capacidade, o equivalente a ela foi recuperado. Já a primeira cota do volume morto, de 182,5 bilhões, talvez somente possa ser recuperada em um ou dois anos. Isso ocorrerá quando o nível do manancial atingir 29,2%.

A utilização do volume morto, segundo especialistas, pode ser comparada ao uso do cheque especial. Ambientalistas também apontam alguns riscos, como o de extinção de uma reserva técnica do manancial, por exemplo.

Rubens Fernando Alencar e Pilker/Folhapress

OUTROS RESERVATÓRIOS

Já o nível do reservatório Alto Tietê, que também sofre as consequências da seca, opera com 18,3% de sua capacidade, o mesmo índice registrado há quatro dias.

O sistema abastece 4,5 milhões de pessoas na região leste da capital paulista e Grande São Paulo. No dia 14 de dezembro, o Alto Tietê passou a contar com a adição do volume morto , que gerou um volume adicional de 39,5 milhões de metros cúbicos de água da represa Ponte Nova, em Salesópolis (a 97 km de São Paulo).

O nível da represa de Guarapiranga, que fornece água para 5,2 milhões de pessoas nas zonas sul e sudeste da capital paulista, avançou 1,1 ponto percentual e opera com 59,8% de sua capacidade.

O reservatório Rio Grande, que atendem a 1,5 milhão de pessoas, caiu 0,1 ponto percentual e opera agora com 83,3%. Já o reservatório Rio Claro, que também atende 1,5 milhão de pessoas, avançou 0,2 percentual. O sistema opera com 35,7%

O sistema Alto Cotia também teve melhora passando de 36,4% para 37,7%. O reservatório fornece água para 400 mil pessoas.

A medição da Sabesp é feita diariamente e compreende um período de 24 horas: das 7h às 7h.

Seca no sistema Cantareira

Nacho Doce – 4.dez.14/Reuters

Vídeo mostra como o Brasil monitora os riscos de desastres naturais (MCTI/INPE)

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JC 5125, 26 de fevereiro de 2015

Os sistemas de monitoramento e prevenção de seus impactos no Brasil também integram o vídeo educacional lançado pelo INCT-MC

Os desastres naturais e os sistemas de monitoramento e prevenção de seus impactos no Brasil são tema do vídeo educacional lançado pelo Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia para Mudanças Climáticas (INCT-MC).

O material integra o projeto de difusão do conhecimento gerado pelas pesquisas realizadas durante os seis anos de vigência do INCT-MC (2008-2014), sediado no Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (Inpe/MCTI).

Dirigido a educadores, estudantes de ensino médio e graduação, e formuladores de políticas públicas, o vídeo traz informações sobre as causas do aumento do número de desastres naturais nos últimos anos e como o País está se preparando para prevenir e reduzir os prejuízos nos diversos setores da sociedade. Pesquisadores e tecnologistas do Centro Nacional de Monitoramento e Alertas de Desastres Naturais (Cemaden/MCTI) mostram como é feito o monitoramento de áreas de risco 24 horas por dia. Também são apresentadas as dimensões humanas, ou seja, como os desastres interferem e prejudicam a vida das pessoas e como o surgimento de novos cenários de risco pode e deve ser evitados.

Até junho, serão concluídos outros cinco vídeos educacionais, abordando temas relacionados às pesquisas do INCT para Mudanças Climáticas: segurança alimentar, segurança energética, segurança hídrica, saúde e biodiversidade.

Portal

O conhecimento produzido durante seis anos de pesquisas realizadas no âmbito do INCT para Mudanças Climáticas está sendo reunido em um portal na internet, a ser lançado neste semestre. O ambiente virtual oferecerá conteúdos com linguagem adequada para os diversos públicos de interesse: pesquisadores, educadores, estudantes (divididos por faixas etárias) e formuladores de políticas públicas. O material estará organizado em seis grandes áreas temáticas: segurança alimentar, segurança energética, segurança hídrica, saúde humana, biodiversidade e desastres naturais.

Leia mais.

(MCTI, via Inpe)

http://www.mcti.gov.br/noticias/-/asset_publisher/IqV53KMvD5rY/content/video-mostra-como-o-brasil-monitora-os-riscos-de-desastres-naturais

Em 10 anos, falta d’água atingirá 2,9 bilhões (Estadão)

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Os países mais deficitários serão os com menos recursos e populações jovens e em crescimento

Um relatório internacional divulgado ontem adverte que, em 15 anos, a demanda mundial por água doce será 40% superior à oferta. Os países mais deficitários serão os com menos recursos e populações jovens e em crescimento. O documento do Instituto de Água, Meio Ambiente e Saúde (INWEH) da Universidade das Nações Unidas com sede no Canadá, prevê que em 10 anos 48 países – e uma população de 2,9 bilhões de pessoas – estarão classifica dos como “com escassez ou com estresse de água”.

O conteúdo na íntegra está disponível em: http://digital.estadao.com.br/download/pdf/2015/02/25/A15.pdf

(O Estado de S.Paulo)

Cantareira recupera 2º volume morto (Estadão)

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Sistema Cantareira atingiu ontem 10,7% da capacidade

Após a 19.ª alta consecutiva, o nível do Sistema Cantareira atingiu ontem 10,7% da capacidade, índice que marca a “recuperação” da segunda cota do volume morto, de acordo com a Companhia de Saneamento Básico do Estado de São Paulo (Sabesp) e a Agência Nacional de Águas (ANA).

O conteúdo na íntegra está disponível em: http://digital.estadao.com.br/download/pdf/2015/02/25/A15.pdf

(O Estado de S.Paulo)

Mais informações sobre o assunto na Folha de S.Paulo – http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/cotidiano/209589-cantareira-recupera-2-parte-do-volume-morto.shtml

Como plantar água (Folha de S.Paulo)

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JC, 5124, 25 de fevereiro de 2015

Governo reage à crise hídrica sobretudo com obras, mas deveria também mudar mentalidade em relação à preservação ambiental, diz o editorial da Folha de S.Paulo

O governo do Estado de São Paulo deixa escapar uma boa oportunidade de trocar a moldura com que enquadra a questão do abastecimento de água na região metropolitana da capital paulista. Mergulhado na crise e no curto prazo, perde de vista as providências de longo alcance que deveria tomar.

O conteúdo na íntegra está disponível em: http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/opiniao/209505-como-plantar-agua.shtml

(Folha de S.Paulo)

Nada cai do céu (Folha de S.Paulo)

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JC, 5124, 25 de fevereiro de 2015

Carlos Magno

Com ou sem chuva à vista, a população precisa entender que a água pode –e vai– acabar se não forem tomadas medidas preventivas

O racionamento a que pode ser submetida boa parte da população paulistana –e de outras cidades e Estados brasileiros– poderia ser evitado? A questão é muito mais complexa do que possa parecer e jamais deveria ser levada ao campo do flá-flu político. Afinal, todos que vivemos nessas áreas já somos e seremos ainda mais afetados.

O calor bate recordes no mundo. Dados recentes da Nasa e da Administração Oceânica e Atmosférica dos Estados Unidos (Noaa, sigla para o nome em inglês do órgão) apontam 2014 como o ano mais quente da história. A temperatura média no solo e nos oceanos aumentou 0,69 graus, superando recordes anteriores. Parece pouco, mas não é.

A cada 20 ou 30 anos, em média, o oceano Pacífico, a maior massa de água do planeta, sofre variações de temperatura, ficando mais quente ou mais frio do que o normal. Essas oscilações de longo período interferem nos ventos, na chuva e na temperatura em muitas regiões do globo. No Brasil, diversos Estados já sentem os impactos dessa alteração climática.

O verão passado foi um dos mais secos e quentes da história, não apenas na região da capital paulista e seu entorno mas também em grande parte do Sudeste, especialmente em Minas Gerais e no vale do Piracicaba, de onde vem a maior parte da água que abastece a região metropolitana de São Paulo, por meio do sistema Cantareira. Áreas dessa região chegaram a registrar anomalias de até 5 graus nas temperaturas máximas em janeiro de 2014.

Com pouca água e maior consumo, devido ao calor, os rios e represas que abastecem o sistema caíram aos menores níveis já registrados. Em São Paulo, por exemplo, desde 2012 o Cantareira vem sofrendo com chuva abaixo do normal. Nem mesmo as chuvas de fevereiro, que elevaram o nível dos reservatórios, são ainda suficientes para mudar o quadro de seca.

E as previsões não são as melhores. Segundo estudo da Climatempo, somente no verão de 2017 é que se poderá esperar por uma chuva normal ou acima da média, que vá colaborar para uma consistente recuperação do sistema.

Reverter a situação é um desafio. Trata-se de algo muito mais educativo do que meteorológico ou de obras faraônicas –que, se agora são necessárias, deveriam ter sido planejadas há pelo menos dez anos.

Desde o final de 2013, meteorologistas têm alertado sobre esse cenário crítico. Já se sabe que o quadro não é favorável, e há poucas chances de mudança em curto prazo.

Porém, em um planeta onde 1,4 bilhão de quilômetros cúbicos é ocupado por água, o ser humano ainda parece acreditar que ela nunca irá acabar.

Com ou sem chuva à vista, a população precisa entender que a água pode –e vai– acabar se não forem tomadas medidas preventivas. A conscientização sobre o consumo deve ser permanente.

Optar pelo reúso pode ser uma das soluções. Aliás, a ideia de cobrar uma sobretaxa para aqueles que consumirem mais água do que o normal nesse período está entre as boas medidas já tomadas –tão boa quanto os descontos anunciados desde o ano passado para quem economiza água.

Em São Paulo, a despoluição dos rios Tietê e Pinheiros também é um caminho. Mas esse parece ser um cenário utópico, sobretudo se lembrarmos que a ideia é citada há décadas pelo poder público.

O que nossas autoridades precisam entender é que não dá para passar uma vida acreditando na ajuda divina. É preciso arregaçar as mangas e se preparar. Há ainda muito a fazer e a investir. Porque nada cai do céu –nem mesmo a água tem caído ultimamente.

CARLOS MAGNO, 53, é meteorologista e presidente da Climatempo Meteorologia

Os artigos publicados com assinatura não traduzem a opinião do jornal. Sua publicação obedece ao propósito de estimular o debate dos problemas brasileiros e mundiais e de refletir as diversas tendências do pensamento contemporâneo. debates@uol.com.br

When Exponential Progress Becomes Reality (Medium)

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Niv Dror on Feb 21

http://www.computerhistory.org/core/media/pdf/core-2015.pdf

“I used to say that this is the most important graph in all the technology business. I’m now of the opinion that this is the most important graph ever graphed.”

—Steve Jurvetson

Moore’s Law

The expectation that your iPhone keeps getting thinner and faster every two years. Happy 50th anniversary.

Components get cheaper, computers get smaller, a lot of comparisontweets.

In 1965 Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made his original observation, noticing that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The prediction was specific to semiconductors and stretched out for a decade. Its demise has long been predicted, and eventually will come to an end, but continues to be valid to this day.

Expanding beyond semiconductors, and reshaping all kinds of businesses, including those not traditionally thought of as tech.

Yes, Box co-founder Aaron Levie is the official spokesperson for Moore’s Law, and we’re all perfectly okay with that. His cloud computing company would not be around without it. He’s grateful. We’re all grateful. In conversations Moore’s Law constantly gets referenced.

It has become both a prediction and an abstraction.

Expanding far beyond its origin as a transistor-centric metric.

But Moore’s Law of integrated circuits is only the most recent paradigm in a much longer and even more profound technological trend.

https://medium.com/media/cd7501e8f6f33fc97bb4b367ec4b23e4?maxWidth=700

Humanity’s capacity to compute has been compounding for as long as we could measure it.

5 Computing Paradigms: Electromechanical computer build by IBM for the 1890 U.S. Census → Alan Turing’s relay based computer that cracked the Nazi Enigma → Vacuum-tube computer predicted Eisenhower’s win in 1952 → Transistor-based machines used in the first space launches → Integrated-circuit-based personal computer

The Law of Accelerating Returns

In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines Google’s Director of Engineering, futurist, and author Ray Kurzweil proposed “The Law of Accelerating Returns”, according to which the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems tends to increase exponentially. A specific paradigm, a method or approach to solving a problem (e.g., shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit as an approach to making more powerful computers) provides exponential growth until the paradigm exhausts its potential. When this happens, a paradigm shift, a fundamental change in the technological approach occurs, enabling the exponential growth to continue.

Kurzweil explains:

It is important to note that Moore’s Law of Integrated Circuits was not the first, but the fifth paradigm to provide accelerating price-performance. Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of time) from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 U.S. Census, to Turing’s relay-based machine that cracked the Nazi enigma code, to the vacuum tube computer that predicted Eisenhower’s win in 1952, to the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal computer.

http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3164&context=smallsat

This graph, which venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson describes as the most important concept ever to be graphed, is Kurzweil’s 110 year version of Moore’s Law. It spans across five paradigm shifts that have contributed to the exponential growth in computing.

Each dot represents the best computational price-performance device of the day, and when plotted on a logarithmic scale, they fit on the same double exponential curve that spans over a century. This is a very long lasting and predictable trend. It enables us to plan for a time beyond Moore’s Law, without knowing the specifics of the paradigm shift that’s ahead. The next paradigm will advance our ability to compute to such a massive scale, it will be beyond our current ability to comprehend.

The Power of Exponential Growth

Human perception is linear, technological progress is exponential. Our brains are hardwired to have linear expectations because that has always been the case. Technology today progresses so fast that the past no longer looks like the present, and the present is nowhere near the future ahead. Then seemingly out of nowhere, we find ourselves in a reality quite different than what we would expect.

Kurzweil uses the overall growth of the internet as an example. The bottom chart being linear, which makes the internet growth seem sudden and unexpected, whereas the the top chart with the same data graphed on a logarithmic scale tell a very predictable story. On the exponential graph internet growth doesn’t come out of nowhere; it’s just presented in a way that is more intuitive for us to comprehend.

We are still prone to underestimate the progress that is coming because it’s difficult to internalize this reality that we’re living in a world of exponential technological change. It is a fairly recent development. And it’s important to get an understanding for the massive scale of advancements that the technologies of the future will enable. Particularly now, as we’ve reachedwhat Kurzweil calls the “Second Half of the Chessboard.”

(In the end the emperor realizes that he’s been tricked, by exponents, and has the inventor beheaded. In another version of the story the inventor becomes the new emperor).

It’s important to note that as the emperor and inventor went through the first half of the chessboard things were fairly uneventful. The inventor was first given spoonfuls of rice, then bowls of rice, then barrels, and by the end of the first half of the chess board the inventor had accumulated one large field’s worth — 4 billion grains — which is when the emperor started to take notice. It was only as they progressed through the second half of the chessboard that the situation quickly deteriorated.

# of Grains on 1st half: 4,294,967,295

# of Grains on 2nd half: 18,446,744,069,414,600,000

https://medium.com/media/e15c92da70168300eace81d3f4ebb942?maxWidth=700

Mind-bending nonlinear gains in computing are about to get a lot more realistic in our lifetime, as there have been slightly more than 32 doublings of performance since the first programmable computers were invented.

Kurzweil’s Predictions

https://medium.com/media/60d5c28137465d41e6c69379f0a13c10?maxWidth=700

Kurzweil is known for making mind-boggling predictions about the future. And his track record is pretty good.

“…Ray is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” —Bill Gates

Ray’s prediction for the future may sound crazy (they do sound crazy), but it’s important to note that it’s not about the specific prediction or the exact year. What’s important to focus on is what the they represent. These predictions are based on an understanding of Moore’s Law and Ray’s Law of Accelerating Returns, an awareness for the power of exponential growth, and an appreciation that information technology follows an exponential trend. They may sound crazy, but they are not based out of thin air.

And with that being said…

Second Half of the Chessboard Predictions

“By the 2020s, most diseases will go away as nanobots become smarter than current medical technology. Normal human eating can be replaced by nanosystems. The Turing test begins to be passable. Self-driving cars begin to take over the roads, and people won’t be allowed to drive on highways.”

“By the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real. We will be able to upload our mind/consciousness by the end of the decade.”

To expand image → https://twitter.com/nivo0o0/status/564309273480409088

Not quite there yet…

“By the 2040s, non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than biological intelligence (a.k.a. us). Nanotech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air and create any object in physical world at a whim.”

These clones are cute.

“By 2045, we will multiply our intelligence a billionfold by linking wirelessly from our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud.”

Multiplying our intelligence a billionfold by linking our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud — what does that actually mean?

In March 2014 Kurzweil gave an excellent talk at the TED Conference. It was appropriately called: Get ready for hybrid thinking.

https://medium.com/media/8891486f4b62e877fead7627bf986972?maxWidth=640

Here is a summary:

https://medium.com/media/c5d818533ad8bcb9072d5a5978264345?maxWidth=700
To expand image → https://twitter.com/nivo0o0/status/568686671983570944

These are the highlights:

Nanobots will connect our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud, providing an extension of our neocortex.

Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking(the non-biological portion is subject to the Law of Accelerating Returns and it will grow exponentially).

The frontal cortex and neocortex are not really qualitatively different, so it’s a quantitative expansion of the neocortex (like adding processing power).

The last time we expanded our neocortex was about two million years ago. That additional quantity of thinking was the enabling factor for us to take aqualitative leap and advance language, science, art, technology, etc.

We’re going to again expand our neocortex, only this time it won’t be limited by a fixed architecture of inclosure. It will be expanded without limits, by connecting our brain directly to the cloud.

We already carry a supercomputer in our pocket. We have unlimited access to all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. Keeping in mind that we are prone to underestimate technological advancements (and that 2045 is not a hard deadline) is it really that far of a stretch to imagine a future where we’re always connected directly from our brain?

Progress is underway. We’ll be able to reverse engineering the neural cortex within five years. Kurzweil predicts that by 2030 we’ll be able to reverse engineer the entire brain. His latest book is called How to Create a Mind… This is the reason Google hired Kurzweil.

Hybrid Human Machines

https://medium.com/media/1b4f664959b169a23b6a9229b1a0d434?maxWidth=700
To expand image → https://twitter.com/nivo0o0/status/568686671983570944

“We’re going to become increasingly non-biological…”

“We’ll also have non-biological bodies…”

“If the biological part went away it wouldn’t make any difference…”

“They* will be as realistic as real reality.”

Impact on Society

A technological singularity —“the hypothesis that accelerating progress in technologies will cause a runaway effect wherein artificial intelligence will exceed human intellectual capacity and control, thus radically changing civilization” — is beyond the scope of this article, but these advancements will absolutely have an impact on society. Which way is yet to be determined.

There may be some regret…

Politicians will not know who/what to regulate.

Evolution may take an unexpected twist.

The rich-poor gap will expand.

https://medium.com/media/6a2859f2f39db3be8c7c87e5f04c1b60?maxWidth=700

The unimaginable will become reality and society will change.

https://medium.com/media/0519689d919760f10742b3621f2d64f3?maxWidth=700

Previsão do tempo no Sudeste é uma dor de cabeça para cientistas (Folha de S.Paulo)

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15/02/2015

Peculiaridades do clima regional tornam difícil saber como ficará o nível do Cantareira mesmo no curto prazo

Área está sujeita à influência de vários fatores complexos, como umidade da Amazônia e frentes frias da Antártida

REINALDO JOSÉ LOPES

COLABORAÇÃO PARA A FOLHA

LUCAS VETTORAZZO

DO RIO

Se a sucessão de boas e más notícias sobre a chuva que abastece os reservatórios de São Paulo parece uma confusão só, não se preocupe: previsões climáticas sobre o Sudeste brasileiro podem confundir até especialistas.

Isso acontece porque a região mais populosa do Brasil ocupa uma área do globo terrestre que recebe todo tipo de influência complexa, desde a umidade oriunda da Amazônia até as frentes frias “sopradas” da Antártida.

Resultado: um nível de incerteza acima do normal numa seara que, por natureza, já é bastante incerta.

“Isso vale principalmente para prever o clima, ou seja, as variações de médio e longo prazo, mas também é verdade, ainda que em grau bem menor, para as previsões de tempo, ou seja, na escala de dias”, diz Tercio Ambrizzi, climatologista da USP.

Portanto, não é que o tempo seja mais instável na área do sistema Cantareira, o mais castigado pela atual crise e agora em ligeira recuperação. O que ocorre é que a região que abastece o Cantareira às vezes pode ficar mais sujeita a variações aleatórias de um sistema climático naturalmente complicado.

TEORIA DO CAOS

“Em escalas maiores do que 15 dias, faz décadas que está comprovado que o clima é caótico”, diz Gilvan Sampaio de Oliveira, meteorologista do Inpe (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais).

“Aliás, foi a partir daí que surgiu a teoria do caos”, afirma ele, referindo-se à ideia de que, em certos fenômenos complexos, pequenas mudanças no começo podem levar a alterações muito maiores e imprevisíveis no fim.

Em regiões tropicais, como é o caso de quase todo o território do Brasil, isso é ainda mais verdadeiro, porque o calor injeta mais energia na atmosfera, fazendo com que alterações do tempo aconteçam com mais velocidade e imprevisibilidade.

Além do calor, porém, o Sudeste também tem a desvantagem de que as variações climáticas por aqui dependem de fatores não oceânicos.

“Quando o clima de uma região depende do oceano, é bem mais fácil prevê-lo porque as variações oceânicas acontecem de forma bem mais lenta do que as da atmosfera”, explica Oliveira. “É o caso do semiárido nordestino, ligado basicamente às condições do oceano Pacífico e do Atlântico tropical. Se é ano de El Niño, com o Pacífico mais aquecido, a tendência é seca no Nordeste.”

Já as chuvas do Sudeste, em especial as de verão, estão ligadas principalmente à ZCAS (Zona de Convergência do Atlântico Sul), formada pela umidade da Amazônia, que se espalha numa grande faixa que atravessa o Brasil Central, e pelas frentes frias antárticas (veja infográfico).

“Quando essa zona se fortalece você pode ter chuva constante por três, quatro, cinco dias, e é bem comum isso acontecer no Carnaval, como inclusive deve acontecer neste ano”, diz Oliveira.

Em 2014 e, em menor grau, também neste ano, contudo, a ZCAS não atuou como deveria, com um bloqueio atmosférico impedindo que as chuvas de verão atingissem o Sudeste (e o Cantareira) em cheio. As chuvas constantes e bem distribuídas voltaram apenas nas últimas semanas, porque a ZCAS parece ter se “ajeitado” de novo.

Mesmo nesse cenário, isso não significa que as chuvas de verão cessem totalmente. Com o calor típico da estação, há um ciclo rápido de evaporação e chuva –mas é um padrão local, o que explica tempestades localizadas e inundações na Grande São Paulo, sem que essas precipitações façam cócegas no Cantareira.

Há ainda outro agravante, que talvez ajude a entender a fama de imprevisível da área. Até pouco tempo atrás, não havia estações pluviométricas confiáveis para medir o volume de chuva na região do Cantareira, conta José Marengo, climatologista do Cemaden (Centro Nacional de Monitoramento e Alertas de Desastres Naturais).

“Os pluviômetros mais próximos eram os de Campos do Jordão. Faltam registros históricos. Não podemos intercalar com os dados de Campos do Jordão porque é outro regime chuva.”

Panel Urges Research on Geoengineering as a Tool Against Climate Change (New York Times)

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By FEB. 10, 2015

Piles at a CCI Energy Solutions coal handling plant in Shelbiana, Ky. Geoengineering proposals might counteract the effects of climate change that are the result of burning fossils fuels, such as coal. Luke Sharrett/Getty Images 

With the planet facing potentially severe impacts from global warming in coming decades, a government-sponsored scientific panel on Tuesday called for more research on geoengineering — technologies to deliberately intervene in nature to counter climate change.

The panel said the research could include small-scale outdoor experiments, which many scientists say are necessary to better understand whether and how geoengineering would work.

Some environmental groups and others say that such projects could have unintended damaging effects, and could set society on an unstoppable path to full-scale deployment of the technologies.

But the National Academy of Sciences panel said that with proper governance, which it said needed to be developed, and other safeguards, such experiments should pose no significant risk.

In two widely anticipated reports, the panel — which was supported by NASA and other federal agencies, including what the reports described as the “U.S. intelligence community” — noted that drastically reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases was by far the best way to mitigate the effects of a warming planet.

A device being developed by a company called Global Thermostat, is made to capture carbon dioxide from the air. This may be one solution to counteract climate change.Henry Fountain/The New York Times 

But the panel, in making the case for more research into geoengineering, said, “It may be prudent to examine additional options for limiting the risks from climate change.”

“The committee felt that the need for information at this point outweighs the need for shoving this topic under the rug,” Marcia K. McNutt, chairwoman of the panel and the editor in chief of the journal Science, said at a news conference in Washington.

Geoengineering options generally fall into two categories: capturing and storing some of the carbon dioxide that has already been emitted so that the atmosphere traps less heat, or reflecting more sunlight away from the earth so there is less heat to start with. The panel issued separate reports on each.

The panel said that while the first option, called carbon dioxide removal, was relatively low risk, it was expensive, and that even if it was pursued on a planetwide scale, it would take many decades to have a significant impact on the climate. But the group said research was needed to develop efficient and effective methods to both remove the gas and store it so it remains out of the atmosphere indefinitely.

The second option, called solar radiation management, is far more controversial. Most discussions of the concept focus on the idea of dispersing sulfates or other chemicals high in the atmosphere, where they would reflect sunlight, in some ways mimicking the effect of a large volcanic eruption.

The process would be relatively inexpensive and should quickly lower temperatures, but it would have to be repeated indefinitely and would do nothing about another carbon dioxide-related problem: the acidification of oceans.

This approach might also have unintended effects on weather patterns around the world — bringing drought to once-fertile regions, for example. Or it might be used unilaterally as a weapon by governments or even extremely wealthy individuals.

Opponents of geoengineering have long argued that even conducting research on the subject presents a moral hazard that could distract society from the necessary task of reducing the emissions that are causing warming in the first place.

“A geoengineering ‘technofix’ would take us in the wrong direction,” Lisa Archer, food and technology program director of the environmental group Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. “Real climate justice requires dealing with root causes of climate change, not launching risky, unproven and unjust schemes.”

But the panel said that society had “reached a point where the severity of the potential risks from climate change appears to outweigh the potential risks from the moral hazard” of conducting research.

Ken Caldeira, a geoengineering researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a member of the committee, said that while the panel felt that it was premature to deploy any sunlight-reflecting technologies today, “it’s worth knowing more about them,” including any problems that might make them unworkable.

“If there’s a real showstopper, we should know about it now,” Dr. Caldeira said, rather than discovering it later when society might be facing a climate emergency and desperate for a solution.

Dr. Caldeira is part of a small community of scientists who have researched solar radiation management concepts. Almost all of the research has been done on computers, simulating the effects of the technique on the climate. One attempt in Britain in 2011 to conduct an outdoor test of some of the engineering concepts provoked a public outcry. The experiment was eventually canceled.

David Keith, a researcher at Harvard University who reviewed the reports before they were released, said in an interview, “I think it’s terrific that they made a stronger call than I expected for research, including field research.” Along with other researchers, Dr. Keith has proposed a field experiment to test the effect of sulfate chemicals on atmospheric ozone.

Unlike some European countries, the United States has never had a separate geoengineering research program. Dr. Caldeira said establishing a separate program was unlikely, especially given the dysfunction in Congress. But he said that because many geoengineering research proposals might also help in general understanding of the climate, agencies that fund climate research might start to look favorably upon them.

Dr. Keith agreed, adding that he hoped the new reports would “break the logjam” and “give program managers the confidence they need to begin funding.”

At the news conference, Waleed Abdalati, a member of the panel and a professor at the University of Colorado, said that geoengineering research would have to be subject to governance that took into account not just the science, “but the human ramifications, as well.”

Dr. Abdalati said that, in general, the governance needed to precede the research. “A framework that addresses what kinds of activities would require governance is a necessary first step,” he said.

Raymond Pierrehumbert, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago and a member of the panel, said in an interview that while he thought that a research program that allowed outdoor experiments was potentially dangerous, “the report allows for enough flexibility in the process to follow that it could be decided that we shouldn’t have a program that goes beyond modeling.”

Above all, he said, “it’s really necessary to have some kind of discussion among broader stakeholders, including the public, to set guidelines for an allowable zone for experimentation.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 11, 2015, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Panel Urges Research on Geoengineering as a Tool Against Climate Change.

The Risks of Climate Engineering (New York Times)

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By CLIVE HAMILTONFEB. 12, 2015

Sarah Jacoby 

THE Republican Party has long resisted action on climate change, but now that much of the electorate wants something done, it needs to find a way out of the hole it has dug for itself. A committee appointed by the National Research Council may just have handed the party a ladder.

In a two-volume report, the council is recommending that the federal government fund a research program into geoengineering as a response to a warming globe. The study could be a watershed moment because reports from the council, an arm of the National Academies that provides advice on science and technology, are often an impetus for new scientific research programs.

Sometimes known as “Plan B,” geoengineering covers a variety of technologies aimed at deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system to counter global warming.

Despairing at global foot-dragging, some climate scientists now believe that a turn to Plan B is inevitable. They see it as inscribed in the logic of the situation. The council’s study begins with the assertion that the “likelihood of eventually considering last-ditch efforts” to address climate destabilization grows every year.

The report is balanced in its assessment of the science. Yet by bringing geoengineering from the fringes of the climate debate into the mainstream, it legitimizes a dangerous approach.

Beneath the identifiable risks is not only a gut reaction to the hubris of it all — the idea that humans could set out to regulate the Earth system, perhaps in perpetuity — but also to what it says about where we are today. As the committee’s chairwoman, Marcia McNutt, told The Associated Press: The public should read this report “and say, ‘This is downright scary.’ And they should say, ‘If this is our Hail Mary, what a scary, scary place we are in.’ ”

Even scarier is the fact that, while most geoengineering boosters see these technologies as a means of buying time for the world to get its act together, others promote them as a substitute for cutting emissions. In 2008, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, later Republican presidential candidate and an early backer of geoengineering, said: “Instead of penalizing ordinary Americans, we would have an option to address global warming by rewarding scientific invention,” adding: “Bring on the American ingenuity.”

The report, considerably more cautious, describes geoengineering as one element of a “portfolio of responses” to climate change and examines the prospects of two approaches — removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and enveloping the planet in a layer of sulfate particles to reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface.

At the same time, the council makes clear that there is “no substitute for dramatic reductions in the emissions” of greenhouse gases to slow global warming and acidifying oceans.

The lowest-risk strategies for removing carbon dioxide are “currently limited by cost and at present cannot achieve the desired result of removing climatically important amounts,” the report said. On the second approach, the council said that at present it was “opposed to climate-altering deployment” of technologies to reflect radiation back into space.

Still, the council called for research programs to fill the gaps in our knowledge on both approaches, evoking a belief that we can understand enough about how the Earth system operates in order to take control of it.

Expressing interest in geoengineering has been taboo for politicians worried about climate change for fear they would be accused of shirking their responsibility to cut carbon emissions. Yet in some congressional offices, interest in geoengineering is strong. And Congress isn’t the only place where there is interest. Russia in 2013 unsuccessfully sought to insert a pro-geoengineering statement into the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Early work on geoengineering has given rise to one of the strangest paradoxes in American politics: enthusiasm for geoengineering from some who have attacked the idea of human-caused global warming. The Heartland Institute, infamous for its billboard comparing those who support climate science to the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, featured an article in one of its newsletters from 2007 describing geoengineering as a “practical, cost-effective global warming strategy.”

Some scholars associated with conservative think tanks like the Hoover Institution and the Hudson Institute have written optimistically about geoengineering.

Oil companies, too, have dipped their toes into the geoengineering waters with Shell, for instance, having funded research into a scheme to put lime into seawater so it absorbs more carbon dioxide.

With half of Republican voters favoring government action to tackle global warming, any Republican administration would be tempted by the technofix to beat all technofixes.

For some, instead of global warming’s being proof of human failure, engineering the climate would represent the triumph of human ingenuity. While climate change threatens to destabilize the system, geoengineering promises to protect it. If there is such a thing as a right-wing technology, geoengineering is it.

President Obama has been working assiduously to persuade the world that the United States is at last serious about Plan A — winding back its greenhouse gas emissions. The suspicions of much of the world would be reignited if the United States were the first major power to invest heavily in Plan B.

Clive Hamilton is a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Australia and the author, most recently, of “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 12, 2015, on page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: The Risks of Climate Engineering.

Aconselhado por espírito indígena, Pezão garante que choverá no Rio (Época)

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Relatório do Cacique Cobra Coral, enviado ao governador do Rio, garante normalização dos reservatórios do Rio até maio; presidente Dilma já foi informada

CRISTINA GRILLO
13/02/2015 19h11 – Atualizado em 13/02/2015 20h35

Governador do Rio de Janeiro Luiz Fernando Pezão (Foto: Pedro Farina)

Governador do Rio de Janeiro Luiz Fernando Pezão (Foto: Pedro Farina)

Celebrai, povo fluminense: vem água por aí. Abram as torneiras, durmam no chuveiro e caprichem no banho do carro. Está liberado até encher a piscina de plástico azul das crianças. Basta comungar da mesma confiança que o governador do Rio, Luiz Fernando Pezão. Ele assegura à ÉPOCA, com tranquilidade budista, que racionamento e rodízio são palavras do passado. Cálculos de volume morto e obras na rede de águas são coisas de políticos sem fé. A convicção de Pezão é transcendental: vem dos céus – embora não de São Pedro. Choverá, ora, porque a médium Adelaide Scritori, a pedido de Pezão, consultou o espírito do Cacique Cobra Coral – e o Cacique mandou dizer que a água não tarda e chegará abundante. Quem é Pezão para discutir com o espírito do Cacique?

O último relato do Cacique veio por email – não do além, mas por meio de Adelaide. No documento, enviado no dia 28 de janeiro, garante-se  que “tudo o que faltou em dezembro e janeiro virá em fevereiro, março e abril”. O email, que afastou da cabeça do governador qualquer ideia de racionamento, foi repassado em seguida, como de costume, a Dilma Rousseff. “A presidente se diverte com os emails do cacique. Riu muito de um que afirmava que o culpado da crise hídrica e energética era o Lobão [Edison Lobão, ex-ministro de Minas e Energia]”, disse Pezão à ÉPOCA em seu gabinete, no Palácio Guanabara. Dilma riu, mas Pezão leva os conselhos do Cacique a sério.

Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral (Foto: reprodução)

Imagem do site da Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral (Foto: reprodução)

A médium Adelaide lidera a Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral. Ela afirma incorporar o espírito do Cacique – um meteorologista sobrenatural, com capacidade para segurar uma tempestade aqui, mandar uma chuvinha lá e, graças a esse dom, fazer com que prefeituras e governos contratem a instituição para garantir seus serviços. No relatório que Pezão encaminhou a Dilma há, no entanto, um alerta para a possibilidade de temporais no Rio. Até junho, diz o Cacique, há o risco de chover, em apenas um dia, a quantidade esperada para um mês inteiro. “É preciso ficar alerta para o excesso de precipitação numa mesma localidade, como a zona norte”, avisa a entidade. Preparem a arca de Noé.

Pezão recebe com regularidade os informes que o espírito do Cacique envia à Prefeitura do Rio – o governo do Estado, afirma, não tem contrato com a fundação; a prefeitura, sim. Mas a relação de Pezão com o Cacique é antiga. Vem desde 1997, quando Pezão era prefeito de Piraí, município a 90 quilômetros da capital. “Eu sempre gostei de fazer festas na rua e conversava com eles para ter tempo bom. Chegava o dia da festa, chovia em todos os municípios vizinhos, e Piraí ficava sequinha, sequinha”, contou o governador. Com a prefeitura do Rio, os acordos da entidade mediúnica vêm dos tempos em que Cesar Maia era prefeito, no início de 2001. Eduardo Paes ameaçou romper com a fundação quando tomou posse em seu primeiro mandato, em 2009. Mas as previsões de temporais na noite do réveillon o fizeram rever a decisão. Não choveu e, desde então, além de satélites e outros instrumentos de alta tecnologia, o Rio conta com a expertise do cacique para ajudar nas previsões meteorológicas.

Mesmo sem contrato com o governo do Estado, a Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral parece estar se esforçando para garantir a normalização dos reservatórios. No domingo, dia 8, a médium Adelaide sofreu um acidente de carro na cidade de Paraibuna, em São Paulo. Ela vinha de Minas para o Rio de Janeiro, acompanhando o curso do rio Paraíba do Sul para avaliar, in loco, o nível dos reservatórios. O carro onde estava capotou três vezes e caiu no rio. Adelaide só teve escoriações leves. “Ela estava vendo tudo para informar ao cacique”, disse Pezão, que conecta seu celular para mostrar algumas fotos do acidente. Cair no rio não seria um mau sinal? “Não! Já está tudo certo, vai voltar a chover”, afirmou o confiante governador.

Das amplas janelas do gabinete de Pezão vê-se o jardim, espetacular, reformulado pelo paisagista francês Paul Villon no início do século XX. No meio do jardim, o chafariz de Netuno jorra, voluptuoso, litros e mais litros de água. “Mas é água de reuso”, apressa-se o governador a explicar, ao ouvir a pergunta sobre o desperdício –mesmo com toda a garantia dada pelo cacique de que o Rio está livre de problemas. Mas, pelo sim, pelo não, no dia seguinte o chafariz estava desligado.

Com chuva, Alckmin adia decisão sobre rodízio de água na Grande SP (Folha de S.Paulo)

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FABRÍCIO LOBEL e GUSTAVO URIBE

DE SÃO PAULO

11/02/2015  02h00

O volume de chuvas no início de fevereiro, que já se aproxima da média para o mês, levou o governo Geraldo Alckmin (PSDB) a adiar a decisão sobre a implantação de um rodízio de água na Grande SP.

Nas palavras de um assessor do governo, “a Sabesp não jogou a toalha” e, diante de um cenário com chuvas até o final de março e o avanço simultâneo de algumas obras, será até mesmo possível atravessar o período de seca, de maio a setembro, sem rodízio.

A Folha teve acesso a esse “plano antirrodízio”, o mais atualizado da Sabesp, a estatal da água. Ele envolve três pontos-chaves, todos interdependentes, sendo que o primeiro nada mais é do que uma ‘torcida meteorológica’:

1) O ritmo de chuvas de fevereiro, que já superou a metade do esperado para o mês e fez aumentar a entrada de água no sistema Cantareira, tem de ao menos permanecer como está até o fim de março;

2) A ligação da represa Billings com o sistema Alto Tietê precisa ser concluída; a obra prevê 11 km de dutos entre os dois mananciais e, segundo o governo de SP, deverá ficar pronta até maio;

3) A capacidade de interligação entre sistemas terá de ser ampliada. Dessa forma, águas do Guarapiranga e do Alto Tietê, por exemplo, poderão atender moradores hoje abastecidos pelo Cantareira em áreas de Guarulhos, na Vila Maria (zona norte), Mooca (zona leste) e Brás (centro).

Editoria de arte/Folhapress

Com tudo isso, aliado principalmente à política de racionamento por meio da redução da pressão na rede de abastecimento, a Sabesp acredita que poderá manter uma vazão de no mínimo 10 mil litros de água por segundo no Cantareira ao longo de 2015, o suficiente, segundo a estatal, para evitar o início do rodízio –a vazão atual é de 14 mil l/seg.

Qualquer falha em um desses três pontos, porém, provocará a reavaliação desse planejamento. O final de fevereiro, por ora, é o prazo tratado internamente como limite para definir o rodízio.

Questionado ontem (10/02) sobre o tema, Alckmin afirmou que não existe nada definido. “É uma decisão técnica, da Sabesp, que faz o monitoramento diário”.

NOVO ÂNIMO

Até o final de janeiro, quando o volume de chuvas seguia bem abaixo da média histórica e o Cantareira caminhava para um colapso completo, o governo paulista tratava o rodízio apenas como uma questão de tempo.

Foi nesse contexto, por exemplo, que um dirigente da Sabesp falou na possibilidade de um rodízio “pesado”, com cinco dias sem água e apenas dois com na semana.

As chuvas de fevereiro não tiraram o Cantareira de uma situação crítica, mas deram uma leve trégua ao governo.

O sistema operou nesta terça (10) com 6,1% de sua capacidade, após mais uma alta. Esse percentual já inclui duas cotas do volume morto, que são as reservas de água abaixo do nível original de captação.

Para evitar um rodízio em 2015, o governo espera que o sistema chegue ao final de março entre 10% e 12% –com o solo úmido após as recentes chuvas, foram reduzidos os danos do chamado “efeito esponja”, que impede o armazenamento da água da chuva.

Estiagem leva 16,8% dos municípios brasileiros a decretar desastre (UOL)

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Leandro Prazeres

Do UOL, em Brasília

11/02/201506h00

No Brasil, 16,8% dos municípios estão, oficialmente, em situação de desastre, que inclui os estágios de calamidade pública e emergência, por conta da estiagem. Os dados são do Ministério da Integração Nacional, que centraliza e reconhece decretos do gênero registrados por municípios e Estados em todo o país. O Nordeste lidera a lista dos municípios afetados pela estiagem. No Ceará, por exemplo, 95% dos municípios estão oficialmente em situação de desastre por conta da seca.

De acordo com dados do ministério, dos 5.570 municípios brasileiros, 936 tinham decretos de situação de emergência ou calamidade pública em vigência. Os dados são de 2 de fevereiro, data em que o órgão fez a última atualização das informações. A partir do reconhecimento federal, municípios e Estados em situação de desastre ficam autorizados a contratar serviços e comprar mantimentos em regime emergencial sem precisar fazer licitação.

Segundo o ministério, não é possível fazer uma comparação entre os dados atuais e os da mesma época do ano passado porque as informações não são compiladas diariamente. Ainda de acordo com o ministério, em 2014, 1.265 municípios tiveram seus decretos de situação de emergência ou calamidade pública reconhecidos pelo governo federal. Em 2013, foram 1.514.

A assessoria de imprensa do ministério informa, no entanto, que não é possível afirmar que a estiagem neste início de ano é mais amena que as dos anos anteriores, pois os dados referentes a 2013 e 2014 só foram contabilizados ao final de cada ano.

Situação no Nordeste

Dos 936 municípios brasileiros oficialmente em situação de desastre, 843 estão no Nordeste, o equivalente a 90%. A região Sudeste é a segunda mais afetada, com 94 municípios em situação de desastre. As demais regiões (Norte, Centro-Oeste e Sul) não têm nenhum município com decreto de desastre reconhecido pelo governo federal.

Todos os nove Estados do Nordeste têm municípios com situação de desastre reconhecida pelo governo federal. A Paraíba lidera o “ranking” da estiagem com 197 decretos. Logo depois vem o Ceará, com 176. Em termos percentuais, no entanto, o Estado mais afetado foi o Ceará, onde 95% dos municípios estão, oficialmente, em situação de desastre.

De acordo com a Defesa Civil do Estado do Rio Grande do Norte, onde 91% dos municípios têm decretos de desastre reconhecidos pelo governo federal, algumas cidades estão em “colapso” — sem condições de atender à população.

Segundo o órgão, o governo tenta colocar em atividade 1.700 poços artesianos para minimizar os efeitos da estiagem. Pelo menos três cidades já enfrentam rodízio de água em regime 24/48 (um dia com água para cada dois sem).

Situação no Sudeste

Apesar de a crise hídrica estar afetando o abastecimento de água em municípios da região Sudeste, especialmente no Estado de São Paulo, apenas três municípios paulistas estão na lista do Ministério da Integração Nacional: Cristais Paulistas, Santa Rita do Passa Quatro e Tambaú.

Segundo o Ministério da Integração Nacional, “não há pedidos de reconhecimento federal dos Estados do Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo” esperando por análise dos técnicos do governo federal.

No Sudeste, o Estado mais afetado é Minas Gerais, com 90 municípios em situação de emergência ou calamidade pública. Segundo o ministério, Minas Gerais ainda tem 25 pedidos em análise.

Entenda a diferença entre situação de emergência e calamidade pública:

Situação de emergência

Situação anormal provocada por desastres (chuvas, estiagem, incêndio etc) que causam danos e prejuízos que comprometam apenas parcialmente a capacidade do Estado ou do município afetado de responder à situação

Calamidade pública

Situação anormal provocada por desastres (chuvas, estiagem, incêndio etc) que comprometem substancialmente a capacidade do Estado ou do município afetado responder à situação. Normalmente, quando um Estado ou Município decreta calamidade pública, o governo federal intercede com ações de socorro e transferência de recursos

Estiagem: imagens aéreas exibem seca nas represas brasileiras

3.fev.2015 – Vista aérea da represa de Jaguari, em Jacareí, no interior de São Paulo. Após fortes chuvas que caíram no Estado de São Paulo, o nível do reservatório registrou aumento e passou de 1,61% para 1,72% da capacidade Lucas Lacaz Ruiz/Estadão Conteúdo

Veja também

Médium da Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral sofre acidente de carro (O Globo)

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Adelaide Scritori estava em Paraibuna quando o seu veículo capotou três vezes e caiu dentro do Rio Paraíba do Sul; com escoriações, ela foi transferida para hospital de São Paulo

POR LUIZ ERNESTO MAGALHÃES

08/02/2015 12:00 / ATUALIZADO 08/02/2015 19:02

RIO – A médium Adelaide Scritori, responsável pela Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral, sofreu um acidente na tarde deste domingo na cidade de Paraibuna, em São Paulo. Adelaide seguia de Minas Gerais para o Rio acompanhando o leito do Rio Paraíba do Sul para monitorar o nível dos reservatórios. O veículo em que estava perdeu o controle, capotou três vezes e caiu dentro d’água.

De acordo com o porta-voz da fundação, Osmar Santos, ela não corre risco de morte, mas sofreu escoriações por todo o corpo e foi levada para um hospital de São Paulo.

– Alguém intercedeu e protegeu a Adelaide – frisou.

A médium diz incorporar o espírito do cacique Cobra Coral, capaz de controlar o clima. Sobre as previsões, Santos disse que a tendência é de que os níveis dos reservatórios voltem a subir com chuvas frequentes até maio.

– As águas vão rolar. O bloqueio foi rompido, mas o cacique não quer conversa com o ministro de Minas e Energia, Eduardo Braga. Nós advertimos em outubro que, se o governador Geraldo Alckmin prosseguisse com o plano de transposição das águas do Rio Paraíba do Sul, a seca iria voltar – disse.

Leia mais sobre esse assunto em  http://oglobo.globo.com/rio/medium-da-fundacao-cacique-cobra-coral-sofre-acidente-de-carro-15281173#ixzz3RHSpz68o 
© 1996 – 2015. Todos direitos reservados a Infoglobo Comunicação e Participações S.A. Este material não pode ser publicado, transmitido por broadcast, reescrito ou redistribuído sem autorização. 

Memes ironizam previsão de temporal no Rio nesta quinta-feira (G1)

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05/02/2015 17h15 – Atualizado em 05/02/2015 21h53

‘Ciclone In Rio’ e ‘Chuva no Rio #VemGente’ foram criados no Facebook.
Prefeitura montou esquema especial para enfrentar chuva que estava prevista.

Do G1 Rio

Memes da chuva no Rio (Foto: Reprodução de internet)

No Facebook, um evento simulanto o Rock In Rio, com o tema ‘Ciclone in Rio, Eu Fui’ também foi criado (Foto: Reprodução de internet)

A forte chuva que foi prevista por meteorologistas para cair na tarde desta quinta-feira (5) deixou muitos cariocas em alerta. A ausência de um grande temporal até as 20h, no entanto, inspirou os internautas que, desde a manhã, encheram as redes sociais de memes relacionados aos transtornos que seriam causados pela chuva.

No Facebook, pelo menos dois eventos foram criados. O “Ciclone In Rio” e o “Chuva no Rio #VemGente”. Na internet, também circulam fotos com a modelo Nana Gouveia posando perto de pessoas que, em outras situações, se refugiaram da chuva.

No Twitter, o personagem fictício Dilma Bolada, uma sátira da presidente, disse que decidiu mandar a chuva para Brasília. “Mandei desviar o ciclone do Rio de Janeiro para o Congresso Nacional. A cidade maravilhosa não merece uma coisa dessas!”. Na mesma rede social, internautas fazem diversas ironias como: “O governador Pezão acabou de anunciar que a chuva no Rio foi cancelada por questões de falta de água”.

No Twitter, internautas ironizam a chuva (Foto: Reprodução/Twitter)

No Twitter, internautas ironizam a chuva (Foto: Reprodução/Twitter)

Alerta pela manhã
Pela manhã, a Prefeitura do Rio apresentou um esquema especial elaborado por diversos órgãos do município para enfrentar a chuva. Cerca de 3,2 mil agentes foram mobilizados no esquema.

A cidade entrou em estágio de atenção às 6h50, afirmou o prefeito Eduardo Paes durante uma coletiva de imprensa no Centro de Operações Rio, no Centro. O estágio de atenção é o segundo nível em uma escala de três e significa a possibilidade de chuva moderada, ocasionalmente forte.

Chuva no Rio 3 (Foto: Reprodução/Twitter)

Chuva no Rio 6 (Foto: Reprodução/Twitter)

 

Chuva no Rio 8 (Foto: Reprodução/Twitter)

Chuva no Rio (Foto: Reprodução/Twitter)

Chuva no Rio 15 (Foto: Reprodução/Twitter)

Chuva no Rio 7 (Foto: Reprodução/Twitter)

Memes da chuva no Rio (Foto: Reprodução de internet)

Meme brinca com o Cristo Redentor (Foto: Reprodução / Twitter)

Meme brinca com o Cristo Redentor (Foto: Reprodução / Twitter)

Brincadeiras como ator Tony Tornado (Foto: Reprodução/Facebook)

Brincadeiras como ator Tony Tornado (Foto: Reprodução/Facebook)

Diversos memes se espalharam pela web por conta da chuva (Foto: Reprodução/Facebook)

Diversos memes se espalharam pela web por conta da chuva (Foto: Reprodução/Facebook)

Memes da chuva no Rio (Foto: Reprodução de internet)

A modelo Nana Gouveia não escapou das piadas na internet em memes sobre a chuva no Rio (Foto: Reprodução de internet)

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Prefeito do Rio diz que foi zombado até pelos filhos após previsão falhar (G1)

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06/02/2015 10h22 – Atualizado em 06/02/2015 17h34

Eduardo Paes diz que procedimento para chuva forte será padrão. Piscinões para conter alagamento na Praça da Bandeira serão inaugurados.

Henrique Coelho Do G1 Rio

Prefeito Eduardo Paes garantiu que procedimento contra chuvas fortes se tornará padrão na cidade. (Foto: Henrique Coelho / G1)

Prefeito Eduardo Paes garantiu que procedimento contra chuvas fortes se tornará padrão na cidade. (Foto: Henrique Coelho / G1)

Mesmo após uma chuva menos intensa que o previsto nesta quinta-feira (5), a Prefeitura do Rio  afirmou que vai continuar adotando os mesmos procedimentos com a previsão de uma chuva e ventos fortes.

“As pessoas sempre pedem planejamento, e ainda bem que não aconteceu nada. Mas vamos continuar fazendo isso porque não podemos deixar de dividir as informações que temos com a população”, disse o prefeito Eduardo Paes, que levou na esportiva as brincadeiras publicadas em redes sociais após as chuvas. “Até meus filhos zombaram de mim hoje de manhã, mas eu entendo. Não tenho vocação para Cacique Cobra Coral”, brincou.

Nesta quinta-feira, a Prefeitura do Rio apresentou um esquema especial elaborado por diversos órgãos do município para enfrentar a situação. Cerca de 3,2 mil agentes foram mobilizados no esquema.

“Vamos continuar com o mesmo esquema, com homens da Comlurb, da Guarda municipal, Cet-Rio”, afirmou, acrescentando que quatro novos piscinões na área da Praça da Bandeira, um dos principais pontos de alagamento da cidade, serão inaugurados neste sábado (7).  “Não levamos a sério algumas coisas no passado, e agora vamos ficar sempre atentos”.

Paes criticou ainda o fato de algumas empresas liberarem seus funcionários mais cedo devido à ameaça de chuva forte. “O dia que for para sair mais cedo, nós vamos avisar”, disparou.

Em sua página pessoal no Facebook, Eduardo Paes reiterou que a prefeitura irá manter os alertas quando houver previsão de temporal. No texto, além de comentar o deboche dos próprios filhos, ele falou da seriedade ao tratar da possibilidade de chuva forte na capital.

“A gente já viu muito drama nesta cidade em razão das chuvas, muita gente morrendo e perdendo o seu patrimônio. O que tenho que afirmar é que isso deve passar a ser algo costumeiro na vida da gente. Toda vez que a gente der um alerta desse, as pessoas devem ficar atentas, como pedi ontem”, registrou o prefeito.

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Chemists Confirm the Existence of New Type of Bond (Scientific American)

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Scientific American Volume 312, Issue 2 

A “vibrational” chemical bond predicted in the 1980s is demonstrated experimentally

Jan 20, 2015 | By Amy Nordrum


Credit: Allevinatis/Flickr

Chemistry has many laws, one of which is that the rate of a reaction speeds up as temperature rises. So, in 1989, when chemists experimenting at a nuclear accelerator in Vancouver observed that a reaction between bromine and muonium—a hydrogen isotope—slowed down when they increased the temperature, they were flummoxed.

Donald Fleming, a University of British Columbia chemist involved with the experiment, thought that perhaps as bromine and muonium co-mingled, they formed an intermediate structure held together by a “vibrational” bond—a bond that other chemists had posed as a theoretical possibility earlier that decade. In this scenario, the lightweight muonium atom would move rapidly between two heavy bromine atoms, “like a Ping Pong ball bouncing between two bowling balls,” Fleming says. The oscillating atom would briefly hold the two bromine atoms together and reduce the overall energy, and therefore speed, of the reaction. (With a Fleming working on a bond, you could say the atomic interaction is shaken, not stirred.)

At the time of the experiment, the necessary equipment was not available to examine the milliseconds-long reaction closely enough to determine whether such vibrational bonding existed. Over the past 25 years, however, chemists’ ability to track subtle changes in energy levels within reactions has greatly improved, so Fleming and his colleagues ran their reaction again three years ago in the nuclear accelerator at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England. Based on calculations from both experiments and the work of collaborating theoretical chemists at Free University of Berlin and Saitama University in Japan, they concluded that muonium and bromine were indeed forming a new type of temporary bond. Its vibrational nature lowered the total energy of the intermediate bromine-muonium structure—thereby explaining why the reaction slowed even though the temperature was rising.

The team reported its results last December in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a publication of the German Chemical Society. The work confirms that vibrational bonds—fleeting though they may be—should be added to the list of known chemical bonds. And although the bromine-muonium reaction was an “ideal” system to verify vibrational bonding, Fleming predicts the phenomenon also occurs in other reactions between heavy and light atoms.

This article was originally published with the title “New Vibrations.”