Merry Christmas Aunt Jeannie & Uncle Brain

 Love ,Peace and Joy  come down on earth 
on Christmas day to make you happy and cheerful 
May Christmas spread  cheer in your life 
May this season of love  warm your home 
May this brighten your roads with hope 
Merry Christmas  to you and all your folks (Mika & Moto ).
Jonny , Sha , Jenny , Man    Carano 



***FROM MIKA AND MOTO***

fifteen year old climate activist tells UN climate sumit, " You are not mature enough to tell it like it is".

When Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old climate activist from Sweden, had the chance to address a global climate change conference this past week, she told officials she had not come there to beg.

“You have ignored us in the past, and you will ignore us again,” she said.

“You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”

Her remarks quickly gained attention on social media, and video of her speech was shared by leading climate scientists and elected officials. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted footage of her address, saying she “called out world leaders for their global inaction on climate change.”

Sanders tweeted:

"Goosebumps! 15 year old activist @GretaThunberg speaks truth to power at the UN climate talks: "You say you love your children above all else, and yet you're stealing their future before their very eyes." 

Thunberg accused leaders of speaking only about “green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular.”

“You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake,” she said. “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is.”

 

The 15-year-old spoke on behalf of Climate Justice Now, a global network of climate advocacy groups. Officials from nearly 200 countries gathered in Poland over the past two weeks to “nudge the world toward stronger targets for reducing carbon emissions and enshrine a clearer set of rules for how to get there,”

Thunberg might be young, but she’s already spent years working as a climate activist.

She first attracted media attention earlier this year when she went on strike from school, holding a sign outside the Swedish parliament building in Stockholm that read, “school strike for climate.” The New Yorker reported that Thunberg spent three weeks sitting in front of parliament during school hours, and later returned to classes for four days a week while continuing to protest on Fridays.

 

The jury for the Children’s Climate Prize wrote that she was nominated as a finalist this year because she has “shown more determination, dedication and strength in combating climate change and working for the future of humanity than most adults or politicians ever do.”

However, on Twitter, Greta asked to be removed from the list of finalists, noting that most people would have to fly to the awards ceremony. “All finalists are to be flown in from all over the world, to be a part of a ceremony, has no connection with reality,” she wrote. “Our generation will never be able to fly (among other things), other than for emergencies. Because the adult generations have used up all our carbon budget.”

Her family uses an electric car only when absolutely necessary. Otherwise, Greta uses her bicycle, the New Yorker wrote in a profile of her. Those are sacrifices she’s willing to make.

“Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury,” she said this week. “It is the suffering of many that pay for the luxuries of few.”
GO GRETA!!!

Knight Moto

Biggest mass extinction caused by global warming leaving ocean animals gasping for breath

December 6, 2018, University of Washington 
The largest extinction in Earth's history marked the end of the Permian period, some 252 million years ago. Long before dinosaurs, our planet was populated with plants and animals that were mostly obliterated after a series of massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia. 
Fossils in ancient seafloor rocks display a thriving and diverse marine ecosystem, then a swath of corpses. Some 96 percent of marine species were wiped out during the "Great Dying," followed by millions of years when life had to multiply and diversify once more.
What has been debated until now is exactly what made the oceans inhospitable to life—the high acidity of the water, metal and sulfide poisoning, a complete lack of oxygen, or simply higher temperatures.
New research from the University of Washington and Stanford University combines models of ocean conditions and animal metabolism with published lab data and paleoceanographic records to show that the Permian mass extinction in the oceans was caused by global warming that left animals unable to breathe. As temperatures rose and the metabolism of marine animals sped up, the warmer waters could not hold enough oxygen for them to survive.
The study is published in the Dec. 7 issue of Science.
"This is the first time that we have made a mechanistic prediction about what caused the extinction that can be directly tested with the fossil record, which then allows us to make predictions about the causes of extinction in the future," said first author Justin Penn, a UW doctoral student in oceanography.
Researchers ran a climate model with Earth's configuration during the Permian, when the land masses were combined in the supercontinent of Pangaea. Before ongoing volcanic eruptions in Siberia created a greenhouse-gas planet, oceans had temperatures and oxygen levels similar to today's. The researchers then raised greenhouse gases in the model to the level required to make tropical ocean temperatures at the surface some 10 degrees Celsius (20 degrees Fahrenheit) higher, matching conditions at that time.
The model reproduces the resulting dramatic changes in the oceans. Oceans lost about 80 percent of their oxygen. About half the oceans' seafloor, mostly at deeper depths, became completely oxygen-free.
To analyze the effects on marine species, the researchers considered the varying oxygen and temperature sensitivities of 61 modern marine species—including crustaceans, fish, shellfish, corals and sharks—using published lab measurements. The tolerance of modern animals to high temperature and low oxygen is expected to be similar to Permian animals because they had evolved under similar environmental conditions. The researchers then combined the species' traits with the paleoclimate simulations to predict the geography of the extinction.
"Very few marine organisms stayed in the same habitats they were living in—it was either flee or perish," said second author Curtis Deutsch, a UW associate professor of oceanography.

This roughly 1.5-foot slab of rock from southern China shows the Permian-Triassic boundary. The bottom section is pre-extinction limestone. The upper section is microbial limestone deposited after the extinction. Credit: Jonathan Payne/Stanford University 
The model shows the hardest hit were organisms most sensitive to oxygen found far from the tropics. Many species that lived in the tropics also went extinct in the model, but it predicts that high-latitude species, especially those with high oxygen demands, were nearly completely wiped out.
To test this prediction, co-authors Jonathan Payne and Erik Sperling at Stanford analyzed late-Permian fossil distributions from the Paleoceanography Database, a virtual archive of published fossil collections. The fossil record shows where species were before the extinction, and which were wiped out completely or restricted to a fraction of their former habitat.
The fossil record confirms that species far from the equator suffered most during the event.
"The signature of that kill mechanism, climate warming and oxygen loss, is this geographic pattern that's predicted by the model and then discovered in the fossils," Penn said. "The agreement between the two indicates this mechanism of climate warming and oxygen loss was a primary cause of the extinction."
The study builds on previous work led by Deutsch showing that as oceans warm, marine animals' metabolism speeds up, meaning they require more oxygen, while warmer water holds less. That earlier study shows how warmer oceans push animals away from the tropics.
The new study combines the changing ocean conditions with various animals' metabolic needs at different temperatures. Results show that the most severe effects of oxygen deprivation are for species living near the poles.
"Since tropical organisms' metabolisms were already adapted to fairly warm, lower-oxygen conditions, they could move away from the tropics and find the same conditions somewhere else," Deutsch said. "But if an organism was adapted for a cold, oxygen-rich environment, then those conditions ceased to exist in the shallow oceans."
The so-called "dead zones" that are completely devoid of oxygen were mostly below depths where species were living, and played a smaller role in the survival rates."At the end of the day, it turned out that the size of the dead zones really doesn't seem to be the key thing for the extinction," Deutsch said. "We often think about anoxia, the complete lack of oxygen, as the condition you need to get widespread uninhabitability. But when you look at the tolerance for low oxygen, most organisms can be excluded from seawater at oxygen levels that aren't anywhere close to anoxic."
Warming leading to insufficient oxygen explains more than half of the marine diversity losses. The authors say that other changes, such as acidification or shifts in the productivity of photosynthetic organisms, likely acted as additional causes.
The situation in the late Permian—increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that create warmer temperatures on Earth—is similar to today.
"Under a business-as-usual emissions scenarios, by 2100 warming in the upper ocean will have approached 20 percent of warming in the late Permian, and by the year 2300 it will reach between 35 and 50 percent," Penn said. "This study highlights the potential for a mass extinction arising from a similar mechanism under anthropogenic climate change."

Thanx  University  of Washington
Knight  Man

On Climate, the Facts and Law Are Against Trump

By Richard L. Revesz        Dec. 4, 2018
Mr. Revesz is a professor at the New York University School of Law.

A Trump rally in West Virginia on Aug. 21, the day the government announced plans to weaken regulations on coal plants.CreditCreditMandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 
A major governmental report released by the Trump administration recently projects enormous damages to communities across the country as a result of climate change. This new volume of the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment includes more alarming predictions than its predecessors did, and it officially puts the Trump administration on the record about the dire threats Americans face. 

The report is likely to bolster anticipated lawsuits against the administration over its decision to vastly weaken the nation’s two major climate change regulations, which would limit planet-warming emissions from power plants and vehicles, the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. The new report could play a key role in these lawsuits.

The administration lawyers who end up arguing these cases may find themselves turning to Carl Sandburg’s famous advice: “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”

Now that this report is part of the official government record, the administration cannot credibly suggest that climate policies should be weakened. Prepared by dozens of experts and government officials, the assessment predicts hundreds of billions of dollars in damages from storms, crop failures, ruined infrastructure and climate-related deaths and illnesses. Stronger regulations to limit emissions are needed, it says.

With the facts against it, the administration will have to argue the law. But that approach has already led to numerous lost deregulatory cases. At the Institute for Policy Integrity, which I direct at the New York University School of Law, we have kept a tally of court challenges to Trump-era deregulatory rules. The administration’s record is dismal: It prevailed in two cases and either lost or abandoned its position in 20 others.

I don't understand Trump at all. Climate scientists are predicting dire circumstances if we don't restrict the burning of fossils fuels. Trump on the other hand advocates the burning of fossil fuels in order to keep some jobs. So we keep some jobs for now and 30,50 100 years from now the land mass of the united states is considerably reduced by the rising oceans, not to mention the incredible loss of life. I don't think Trump is stupid, he knows what he is doing. I think Trump is evil. 
So not only have the facts been against the government’s position. So has the law.

On the power plant emissions rule, the administration’s own analysis shows that its weaker regulatory scheme will be dramatically worse for the public. In fact, the administration’s so-called Affordable Clean Energy Rule is likely to increase overall emissions by creating new loopholes for coal plants to evade air pollution restrictions and operate more frequently. That will cause a significant increase in climate pollution and up to 1,400 additional American deaths per year, according to the government’s projections. The E.P.A. says that it is exercising its discretion in choosing this rule, which will impose tens of billions of dollars of net harms on the American people. This is a textbook example of “arbitrary and capricious” conduct — exactly what the law prohibits.

In weakening the vehicle emissions rule, the administration relies on economic and legal arguments that don’t stand up to scrutiny. The current standards require automakers to steadily increase the fuel efficiency of new passenger vehicles, limiting climate pollution while reducing consumer fuel costs. 

The Trump administration has proposed freezing the standards in 2021 and revoking a waiver that allows California to set its own, more stringent vehicle pollution limits, which other states follow. 

Officials claim the resulting increases in pollution and fuel costs are justified by supposed safety benefits from rolling back the standards. It assumes that stricter efficiency standards raise the price of vehicles. Standard economic theory predicts that people would then buy fewer cars because each car would be more expensive. But instead, the administration’s faulty analysis leads it, wholly implausibly, to the opposite conclusion: that people will buy more cars, and therefore drive more miles and have more accidents.

Even Andrew Wheeler, the acting E.P.A. administrator whom Trump has nominated for the post, reportedly argued that this justification will fail in court. Yet the administration released the proposal anyway. At the same time, despite a lack of legal authority to do so, the administration has proposed to revoke California’s waiver, a move without precedent. Doing so would trample on the interests of California and other states that have relied on the waiver to set policies for their benefit, and do violence to core principles of federalism. Again, on these issues, the law is against the administration.

So without the facts or law on its side, the Trump administration may have no choice but to “pound the table and yell like hell” when explaining its willful inaction on climate change. It may yell about “freedom” — a rhetorical cover frequently used by administration officials trying to justify efforts to let industry pollute freely, regardless of public health consequences. For instance, Neomi Rao, the regulatory czar nominated to fill Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s federal court seat, wrote recently that the administration’s deregulatory efforts are about “unleashing the freedom of American workers, innovators and businesses.” 

The freedom that the Trump administration favors has little to do with what the founding fathers prized. It is a freedom for favored industries to impose numerous premature deaths, hospitalizations and other major harms on the public in pursuit of profit, even when the net cost to society is large.

The Trump administration will have nothing to show for pounding its fists and yelling. Without the facts or the law on its side, these antics won’t be an adequate legal defense for the administration’s choice to undermine the very climate policies its report says are needed to protect Americans.
Richard L. Revesz is a professor and dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law, where he directs the Institute for Policy Integrity.
Thanx Richard  L. Revesz

Knight Jonny

Greenland is melting ..... What unprecedented' ice loss means for Earth

The ice sheet is melting faster than in the last 350 years—and driving sea levels up around the world.

For a few days in July of 2012, it was so hot in the Arctic that nearly the entire surface of the Greenland ice sheet turned to slush.

It was so uncharacteristically warm that scientists, emerging from their tents high on the peak of the ice sheet, sank up to their knees in the suddenly soft snow. And then, that snow started melting.

Near the edge of the ice sheet, bright blue puddles collected on the flat white surface. Rivulets of melt trickled down, braiding into fat, gushing rivers. The meltwater punched through gullies and spilled down crevasses. One river near the edge of the ice sheet was so swollen that it swept away a bridge that had been there for decades. So much water spilled out of the guts of the ice sheet that year that global sea levels rose by over a millimeter.

 

The melting was alarming, like nothing scientists had seen before. But no one knew exactly how unusual the event was or how worried to be. But now, scientists have figured out that the hot 2012 summer capped off 20 years of unprecedented increases in meltwater runoff from Greenland. And even more concerning, they found, melting is speeding up even faster than air temperatures warm. So yes, they found, 2012 was a particularly bad year—but it was just a preview of what might come.

“The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is greater than at any point in the last three to four centuries, and probably much longer than that,” says Luke Trusel, a researcher at Rowan University in New Jersey and lead author of the new study, published today in Nature
And the effects of the melting aren’t just abstract: A complete melting of Greenland’s mile-thick ice sheets would dump seven meters (23 feet) of extra water into the world’s ocean. So what happens high in the poles matters to anyone who lives near a coast, eats food that comes through a coastal port, or makes a flight connection in an airport near the ocean, scientists warn.

Reading the ice like a book of the past

Scientists already knew that Greenland was melting fast; they could track its shrinking size from satellites. But the key satellite data only goes back until the early 1990s—so they couldn’t tell exactly how alarmed to be by the melting. Had this kind of jaw-dropping warming happened before? How unusual was it, compared to the time before human-caused climate change kicked into gear? No one knew.

They had to figure out a way to look back in time, so they went to the source: the ice sheet itself. They fanned across the ice surface and drilled a suite of ice cores that recorded signals of how much and how intensely the surface of the ice sheet had melted over the past few hundred years. They compared that with models, which let them calculate how much runoff would result from the kind of surface melting recorded in the ice cores.

And in both, they saw a clear signal. Melting and runoff started creeping upward just when the first stirrings of human-caused climate change hit the Arctic, in the mid-19th century. But the real drama unfolded in the past 20 years; suddenly, melt intensity shot up, up to nearly six-fold higher than it was before the Industrial Revolution.
“It’s really like turning on a switch,” says Beata Csatho, a glaciologist at the University at Buffalo.

 

The blob effect

It was also clear that melting was speeding up faster than the temperature rose. The warmer it got, the more sensitive the ice sheet was to that warming, primarily because melting at the surface changes its color.

“Think of a white fluffy snowflake,” explains Trusel. “As it melts, it’s going to become a blob.”

And blobs absorb more of the sun’s heat than fluffy, bright-white flakes. And the more heat they absorb, the blobbier they become, and the more they melt. “So even without any temperature change, once they get set in motion they just want to melt even more,” says Trusel.

That doesn’t bode well for the future, particularly because air temperatures in the Arctic are rising faster than anywhere else on the planet.

“What we're seeing right now is really unprecedented. These melt increases are driven by warming, which is caused by humans pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” says Ellyn Enderlin, a glacier scientist at the University of Maine. “The feedbacks the Earth has, the checks it has—they can't make up for that. The system can't adjust to the rate of change right now.”

 

Moto the Wanna-be Knight

My sweet little Mika on the right and funny old Moto on the left

always looks like he has a headache

 

Moto on a very bad hair day

 This time it looks like he has a pain in his right eye

 

In this photo he seems a wee bit constipated

 

We will photograph him in his armor and see if we can make him look good.

He's so happy you are going to Knight him and would like to know if he has to write a post to become a knight... or just memorize the Knights' Oath.

 

 

He once considered becoming an artist

 

but he got a headache and took a nap