Weather Update for 8/27 and 8/28

News — admin August 26, 2011 at 12:16 pm

Here is an update on our plans for the coming weekend as a result of Hurricane Irene:

Being mindful of the State of Emergency declared, we will have a rally on Saturday, but will not engage in civil disobedience. We will meet at Lafayette Park for the rally at 10am, and hope to be done before the storm hits. That evening, we will still have the Artists For the Climate event (How to Defuse a Carbon Bomb) at St. Stephen’s Church (1525 Newton Street Northwest, near Columbia Heights Metro)

Anyone concerned about travel arrangements or other issues related to the storm is encouraged to reschedule their plans to join us in the coming week, which we expect to be even bigger and stronger than the one past.We will discuss as a group our plans for tomorrow during this evening’s training session, which will continue as planned, based on the latest weather updates.

Sunday’s demonstration will be cancelled, in the interests of safety, and out of respect for everyone dealing with the immediate effects of this monster storm.

Sunday’s training for Monday’s action is still planned to happen at Mt. Vernon Church at 5pm, barring major power outages or other disruptions.

It does not escape our attention that storms of this size and character will be the new normal on a warmer planet. We are more committed than ever to continuing our campaign to stop Keystone XL and the tar sands development, and we will be back in action Monday.

Comments (26)

http://www.gothelimit.org R. Shamel

Thanks for the update. We’ll be there Monday, as planned.
George Hoguet

My Megabus arrives DC Sunday at `1:00 pm (God willing – no cancellation so far), and I am planning to be at the training 8-28, but last I looked that was to be Mount Vernon Methodist. Is Sunday’s training switched to St. Stephen’s?
Brenda

I plan to be at the training on Sunday and at the White House on Tuesday. However, I will be unable to check online status updates of training while en route to DC all day Sunday – is there a phone number we can call to confirm the training details?
- Brenda
  
  Woops – I meant I’ll be at the White House on Monday, not Tuesday.
Leslie

Okay, we will regroup and plan to come and sit-in on September 3rd rather than August 28th.
Aunt Barb

It’s over. The administration approved the pipeline. Don’t drown in the hurricane, dummies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/27/business/energy-environment/us-state-department-to-allow-canadian-pipeline.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto
- Anonymous
  
  The State Department said they did not expect significant damage. The final approval still has to come from Obama after a public comment and hearing period. One: Don’t troll. Two: Read the articles you post. Three: Really, don’t troll.
  - Brenda
    
    Well said!
  - Charles_Siegel
    
    To be a bit more precise, the State Dept. EIS said there would not be significant damage, but I believe the State Dept. has not approved the project yet.
    
    If the administration does approve the project, I expect there will be a suit over the EIS. It is clearly inadequate, because it does not consider the impact on global warming. The administration’s own Environmental Protection Agency has criticized the State Dept’s EIS.
http://leifutne.com Leif Utne

Is there a reason there’s no date stamp on the posts on this blog?
Anonymous

FAUX HEADLINE: Climate Disruption Non-Violent Direct Action Demonstration Event Called Off On Account of Climate Disruption Weather Event.
Bill Cook

This sounds sensible. Another indication of the quality of our organizers.

Sorry to Sunday’s group for the cancellation. Hopefully, a lot of you can add into later days.

Don’t let the State Dept’s finding bring you down. We must continue to state our finding to the president. It’s the people’s will that must prevail. We can’t be party to despoiling the land, poisoning indigenous people, and accelerating carbon emissions.

There is a priority above the economy: the common good. We must continue to make that plain.
Barbara Ford

Six of us from Oregon stopped in Chicago after 48 hours of Amtrak travel, after a late arrival and missing tonight’s train. No trains going out tomorrow, perhaps Sunday evening. We are sorry to miss the interfaith event, really hope to make it for the Tuesday action before we have to return on Wednesday. Good wishes to all of you riding out the storm
Dcrane

The opinion of this group of thoughtless martinets is a travesty. Grow up!
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Timothy-Hanes/1170262640 Timothy Hanes
  
  Growing up requires you to look at things as they are, not how you want them to be. So in the interests of clarification:
  1. Actions environmental activists would agree with have only ever had one effect on the price of gasoline- huge drops. Conservation measures from the 70′s-80′s led to the substantial drops in usage that helped allow the cheap prices of the mid-late 80′s. Gas taxes in the US are only used to build roads, and have never been used to discourage use. US production peaked in the 70′s, fallen because we used up the easily-obtained reserves, and gas is up because of world-wide demand, NOT the EPA. So grow up! Drill baby drill is a right-wing fantasy. Gas is expensive because its becoming hard to get. Supply and demand. Go to college and learn about it. Oh, but first you would have to GROW UP!
  2. Science shows global warming is real, it’s us, it’s already happening, and as shown by the last few years, the IPCC reports, by heavily weighting the most defensible, lowest-bound predictions, seem to have lulled even sensible people into a very false sense that we have decades to act. As Richard Alley says, the messing with the climate is like playing with a drunk- paleoclimate data shows abrupt, violent lurches from one state to the next with what would be catastrophic consequences for the 7 billion of us here who are already having a hard enough time of it.
  3. The consequences are already hugely expensive. Check out Oklahoma and Texas, you martinet! Prayer doesn’t seem to help. You might try science.
  You might try growing up.
  - andy
    
    “science shows global warming is real”
    It certainly is, but science also shows us global cooling is real. The warming and cooling is just natural climactic variation that has been happening since the dawn of time.
    IPCC ‘science’ is not based on empirical observation, just extremely inaccurate models – Hansen’s A, B and C model scenarios being typically laughable.
    
    The recent CLOUD experiment at CERN demonstrated how the sun’s variability can affect the formation of clouds (perhaps the most important climate driver). This is good science based on empirical observation, not ridiculous models. If anything, the CLOUD experiment shows we know very little about the climate and how it works. It is pure arrogance for environmentalists to believe man’s relatively minute emissions of a trace gas can have any noticeable effect on the Earth’s climate.
    BTW the frequency of hurricanes/storms has not increased over the recorded time, so they can’t be blamed on ‘AGW’
    - Charles
      
      Dear Andy,
      
      You are right in that “global warming” happens on a regular basis. These are known as Milankovitch Cycles. However, Milankovitch Cycles happen on a set period of time – every 40,000 years. We know when the next one will happen. It is not happening now. Natural climactic variation does not explain the dramatic increase in temperature we are seeing now.
      
      Besides that, there are many instances of empirical evidence of carbon’s effect, beginning with the Tyndale experiments in the mid-19th century. There’s no less than thousands of experiments that have established a direct link between carbon and the greenhouse gas effect. Not modelling – but controlled experiments.
      
      Here’s a good intro:
      
      http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect.htm
      
      After you get the basics, it might be good to click on the advanced tab.
      
      As someone who has busted his ass in learning science and the practice of conducting experiments for 10 years, its plain hogwash to hear criticism from Timothy Haynes – someone who clearly hasn’t said a single honest thing in his life nor put any honest work behind his statements. Shame!
      - andy
        
        Ah yes, the Tyndale experiment – I’ve seen the ‘CO2 in a glass cylinder’ trick performed many times, and I’ve always thought that how anyone could believe that the analysis of the behaviour of gas in a glass container could in any way represent the extremely chaotic nature of the earth’s climate is completely beyond me.
        Don’t get me wrong – I am not denigrating Tyndale, as his experimental results were fascinating, but I think he would have been dismayed to have seen his findings used by certain people today who wish to cripple modern prosperity by ruinously expensive taxes and massively inefficient power generation (windfarms being a laughable case in point). Victorians such as Tyndale were looking to advance the prosperity of their fellow people, not cripple them.
        
        People’s obsession with the trace gas CO2 is ridiculous. However much ranting and raving warmists make about ‘carbon’, they cannot deny that the most ubiquitous ‘greenhouse’ gas, and therefore the most influential, is water vapour (hence the reason why the results of the CLOUD experiment are so fascinating). Tyndale himself admitted that without water vapor, the Earth’s surface would be “held fast in the iron grip of frost.”
        
        You talk about the “dramatic increase in temperature we are seeing now” when for more than a decade the global temperature has been flat-lining (maybe even declining). Besides which, we are talking about changes in temperature measured in mere tenths of a degree, which i refuse to believe is any cause for concern – the Earth has been many degrees warmer in the past and no ‘tipping point’ has ever been reached. Thankfully, for the last 110 years we have witnessed the Earth clawing its way out of a mini ice-age. For warm-blooded creatures such as ourselves, this global warming should be celebrated not feared.
        
        I’ve visited the ‘skepticalscience’ website before and it’s amused me no end with its hysteria and arrogant assumptions that we can in any way control the Earth’s climate by attempting to eradicate our relatively minuscule levels of production of CO2. (BTW if you want an even bigger laugh, go and visit Joe Romm at RealClimate – you can almost taste the hysteria!)
        
        The last thing I’d like to ask of you is this: as Spencer et al’s latest paper (http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603/) has found that “the satellite-based metrics for the period 2000–2010 depart substantially in the direction of lower climate sensitivity from those similarly computed from coupled climate models”, by how much do you believe we can reduce global temperatures by the eradication of all mankind’s CO2 production (and therefore bring global prosperity and our quality of life to its knees)?
Yourareidiots

go fuck yourselves
- Charles_Siegel
  
  Notice that the anti-environmentalists tend to rely on name calling and obscenities, with no facts or arguments to back their points. People who do this simply discredit themselves.
  
  This guy can’t even spell “you are idiots” correctly. He writes “your are idiots” instead.
  - andy
    
    Sorry about him. I’m a skeptic, but I try to keep it civil.
    A point to note: being a sceptic does not in any way mean I am ‘anti-environmental’. As a scuba-diver I am very concerned for the fish stocks that are being virtually emptied by the commercial fishing industry. That is the kind of true environmentalism we should all be involved in, not worrying about the virtually un-measurable effects or CO2 has on the world’s climate.
    I have yet to have any warmist give me a quantifiable number of degrees that the earth will cool by if we cease all of our CO2 production. Has anybody here got an answer?
Anonymous

Hey, it’s people like you that cause $4 a gallon gas. It’s YOUR FAULT, you assholes.
- Charles_Siegel
  
  Not my fault. I don’t own a car. I haven’t bought gasoline for years. If everyone were like me, gasoline would be very cheap.
  
  $4 gas is the fault of people like you, who burn gas as if there were no tomorrow.
Dan M’Naughten

Dear Moderator(s):

You have removed my posts . . . and banned me from posting.

I guess it doesn’t matter that my comments weren’t abusive or inappropriate. They only expressed opinions that diverge from yours.

You proudly wave the flag of your country.

You cherish the ability to speak and express yourself freely, and fully take advantage of these freedoms . . . without fear of persecution.

Yet, you readily deprive others of these same opportunities. In fact, you have no hesitation in quashing debate . . . even though this is a critical element of democracy.

You should be ashamed of your hypocrisy.
- Kim
  
  There is really nothing to debate.
  - andy
    
    I’m afraid the true nature of the scientific method dictates that any theory will always be open to debate. No science is ever ‘settled’ – it is in fact anti-science to use a word like ‘settled’.
    With the many, many failed predictions that have been made by those promoting AGW, I would say the warmists science is wide open for debate (if you want some evidence of those failed predictions I can supply you with them. As an example, Hansen’s A, B, and C scenarios were particularly laughable).