[url=https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-epa-wheeler/senate-set-to-confirm-ex-coal-lobbyist-to-lead-top-u-s-environment-regulator-idUSKCN1QH1LA]Senate confirms ex-coal lobbyist to lead U.S. environment regulator[/url] | Reuters

On the good-news front, Big Coal and its sister in greenhouse emissions, Natgas, are fading away inexorably simply based on pricing trends for renewable energy:

[url=https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/02/inevitable-death-natural-gas-bridge-fuel.html]The Inevitable Death of Natural Gas as a ‘Bridge Fuel’[/url] | naked capitalism
[quote]Renewables have become the low-cost fuel source for new power generation much faster than most anticipated, killing arguments to use natural gas as a bridge fuel away from coal-fired power generation. This is great news for the climate.[/quote]

[QUOTE=ewmayer;509694][url=https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-epa-wheeler/senate-set-to-confirm-ex-coal-lobbyist-to-lead-top-u-s-environment-regulator-idUSKCN1QH1LA]Senate confirms ex-coal lobbyist to lead U.S. environment regulator[/url] | Reuters

On the good-news front, Big Coal and its sister in greenhouse emissions, Natgas, are fading away inexorably simply based on pricing trends for renewable energy:

[url=https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/02/inevitable-death-natural-gas-bridge-fuel.html]The Inevitable Death of Natural Gas as a ‘Bridge Fuel’[/url] | naked capitalism[/QUOTE]
Even the government's own [url=https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/aeo2019.pdf]Annual Energy Outlook 2019[/url] has coal production declining at least as fast as previous outlooks, despite [i]Il Duce[/i]'s bloviation about how "the war on coal is over." The [i]real[/i] war on coal is being waged by the "invisible hand of the market."

Perhaps if those burdensome safety regulations were relaxed to a point where miners were once again dying like they were a hundred years ago here in the good ol' USA (or like they have been in China in modern times), the price of coal could be reduced enough for it to make a comeback.
:no:

As in 2017, [url=https://www.bas.ac.uk/media-post/halley-research-station-closes-for-2019-antarctic-winter/]Halley Research Station closes for 2019 Antarctic winter[/url]. That station is IMO really well engineered -- they can move it around to get it out of harm's way.

There could be a city-size iceberg calving off that ice shelf in the not-too-distant future. Cracking has increased in recent years, but of course, it's impossible to attribute any single event to climate change...

Glad it's no longer called Global Warming
 

Many parts of Canada had the coldest February ever recorded

[url=https://www.apnews.com/6f5ae325e919481fa081c188b1d5dc3f]School lessons targeted by climate change doubters[/url]

[QUOTE=petrw1;509894]Many parts of Canada had the coldest February ever recorded[/QUOTE]

While in most of Finland, the weather was much warmer than the long term average. In Southern Finland in particular, it was about 6°C warmer than average. And this is not even a particularly rare occurrence, statistics say this happens about every 5-10 years. We sometimes get what is called the Föhn wind, when the wind conditions are just right, and moist air first rises along the Scandinavian mountains, releases most of its moisture there on the western slopes, then comes down and warms up while travelling east. Some parts of Canada have the same effect but there it's called [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_wind"]Chinook wind[/URL].

On the other hand, now that the wind direction changed, it's unseasonably cold. Yesterday was -16°C with snow. Forecasts say it'll be warm(ish) again for a couple days, like +2°C and rain, then back to -10...-15°C and snow for the next week. Springtime, yeah.

Weather, not climate. Climate change looks at global averages over longer time periods than even a month. Even a year is really too short. Local variance may be greater and sometimes in surprising directions as usual weather patterns change or break down completely, like what was now happening with the jet stream (and the polar vortex).

[QUOTE=petrw1;509894]Many parts of Canada had the coldest February ever recorded[/QUOTE]

That sounds polar-vortex-related - one of the predictions associated with global warming is more frequent blasts of frigid air from the N pole, i.e. parts of the N America will be colder than usual whereas the N-polar region itself will be much warmer than usual. Again ya really gotta track global averages to get the signal, since "all real estate is local".

[QUOTE=ewmayer;510448]Again ya really gotta track global averages to get the signal, since "all real estate is local".[/QUOTE]

Climate is almost a RMS function of the Weather.

To be honest, it's been a little chilly here in Bimshire lately. Only 28 degrees centigrade currently....

[QUOTE=chalsall;510450]To be honest, it's been a little chilly here in Bimshire lately. Only 28 degrees centigrade currently....[/QUOTE]Well, if you really [strike]want to gloat like that[/strike] think temps like that are chilly, I can think of somewhere warmer for you to go
;-)

Years ago, I noticed the preponderance of recent record highs over recent record lows, in a beginning-of-the-month summary of record highs and lows since records had been kept, for every date of the preceding month, in the local paper.

The "average" temp for a given date is usually a 30-year average, so I'd look at how many record highs and how many record lows had occurred within the past 30 years for that month. The highs usually had it by a long way.

This is a more extensive version of that sort of thing, but over the last 20 years.

[url=https://www.apnews.com/7d00e38b9ba1470fa526b1da739c5da8]Heat records falling twice as often as cold ones, AP finds[/url][quote]Over the past 20 years, Americans have been twice as likely to sweat through record-breaking heat rather than shiver through record-setting cold, a new Associated Press data analysis shows.

The AP looked at 424 weather stations throughout the Lower 48 states that had consistent temperature records since 1920 and counted how many times daily hot temperature records were tied or broken and how many daily cold records were set. In a stable climate, the numbers should be roughly equal.[/quote]

[url=https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190314151645.htm]Tectonics in the tropics trigger Earth’s ice ages[/url] | Science Daily
[quote]Each of the last three major ice ages were preceded by tropical ‘arc-continent collisions’ — tectonic pileups that occurred near the Earth’s equator, in which oceanic plates rode up over continental plates, exposing tens of thousands of kilometers of oceanic rock to a tropical environment. …[T]he heat and humidity of the tropics likely triggered a chemical reaction between the rocks and the atmosphere. Specifically, the rocks’ calcium and magnesium reacted with atmospheric carbon dioxide, pulling the gas out of the atmosphere and permanently sequestering it in the form of carbonates such as limestone. Over time… this weathering process, occurring over millions of square kilometers, could pull enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to cool temperatures globally and ultimately set off an ice age. ‘We think that arc-continent collisions at low latitudes are the trigger for global cooling,’ says Oliver Jagoutz, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. ‘This could occur over 1-5 million square kilometers, which sounds like a lot. But in reality, it’s a very thin strip of Earth, sitting in the right location, that can change the global climate.'[/quote]
So we just need a way to engineer this plate-movement thing...