Another great Film in this genre is “‘The People Trap” but so far as I can tell this film is lost with no surviving copies available, or at least none in intact condition. It first aired on TV in 1966 so the original video tape may have been recycled as so many Dr Who episodes were.

There are hydrogen based fuels that offer carbon free exhausts, but whether these can be produced without use of existing carbon based energy sources is hard to say.
One company has suggested non polluting tide motors and deep ocean heat exchange power sources to generate hydrogen from sea water and transport the hydrogen to ports by way of special tanker ships similar to existing LPG carriers.

That was in Logan’s Run. Are you saying it was in Soylent Green too? (I never saw Soylent Green.)

New England got whupped like a rented mule by hurricanes in the 17th and 18th century. One so bad it create new inlets.

They’d find a way to screw that up and set off a chain reaction that released billions of tons of methane from the sea floor all at once.

One thing I’ve been wondering about is whenever a “Storm of the Century” is brought up they only speak of hurricanes or blizzards.
The most deadly and destructive storms since Medieval times have been the Cyclones that hit Pakistan and India, with the most deadly happening before 1980.

This
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Nargis
Was the only one on the list for the 21st Century and deadly as it was it pales compared with the earlier Cyclones in the region.

Au contraire, GY #111. It is certainly already mentioned in the context of policy:

… As a key element of Climate Action Plan, this strategy outlines new actions to reduce methane emissions… …The US Department of Agriculture (USDA), EPA and the Department of Energy (DOE) will jointly release a “Biogas Roadmap” outlining voluntary* strategies to accelerate adoption of methane digesters and other** cost-effective technologies to reduce U.S. dairy sector greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020 …

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/strategy_to_reduce_methane_emissions_2014-03-28_final.pdf

* ‘voluntary’ — I’ll bet.
** these other strategies are to include low lignin GMO grass, GMO cows, and ‘probiotic’ gut bacteria to bypass metabolic routes that produce methane.

http://sullivanfiles.net/gm_crops/student_projects/hagner_gmo/pros.html

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/aug/08-fighting-cow-methane-at-the-source

Perhaps the general populace is not so introduced to the idea yet as a PR move — The idea of telling cows not to fart in the privacy of their own field does seem a little ludicrous to many named John Q. Public.
=======================================

Man, don’t play with the protein:
I believe this GMO grass and more efficient (less CH4) cows to be quite misguided (and potentially dangerous) as actual grassfed cows are already somewhat efficient and ‘in compliance’ with the stated reductions — It is feeding them crap (corn, soy, et. al) that gives them the extra gas. It is factory farming which is the greatest offender here and not the local citizen farmer with seven cows on his back-fourty; Any restrictions will weigh most heavily on small-time individuals who can’t afford to wade through the bureaucratic bull-stink by ‘offsetting’ his own very small buttprint through some kind of flatulence indulgence.
————————-

I cringe to see the flaring off of methane in the oil/gas industry. Why do they do this? Could it be because the product that contributes to the ‘petro-dollar’ is petroleum so that allowing others to cheaply use that ‘waste product’ undercuts the bottom line?

I believe we should mine the methane hydrates/clathrates and reduce ‘drilling’.

An old and perhaps naive pet hypothesis of mine for the cycling glacial periods was this — (1) photosynthesis uses up all the co2 –> (2) things ice over –> (3) everything dies, lying around and rotting producing only CH4 instead of being burned and/or properly metabolized to release CO2 –> (4) the GHG action of the methane leads to warming and resumed photosynthesis–>> return(step 1).

The AMO might be a factor since it affects temperatures from the equator to the arctic.
Its also believed to exaggerate the effects attributed to global warming.

There’s been talk of the sea surface temps not rising for the last decade plus, with the explanation that the warming surface water has been drawn down into the deeper waters.

Perhaps something is at work to stir the pot at some locations but not others and only at certain times of the year, releasing more warmth to the surface which then cools as the surface winds carry away the moisture.

If in the mid 60’s the warm waters of the gulf stream gave up a significant portion of that warmth along the coast of the U S then the Norwegian Current which gets some warmth from the North Atlantic Drift extension of the Gulf Stream could not warm the eastern tip of Iceland enough to prevent it from being surrounded by sea ice.

“Models of the ocean and atmosphere that interact with each other indicate that the AMO cycle involves changes in the south-to-north circulation and overturning of water and heat in the Atlantic Ocean. This is the same circulation that we think weakens during ice ages, but in the case of the AMO the changes in circulation are much more subtle than those of the ice ages. The warm Gulf Stream current off the east coast of the United States is part of the Atlantic overturning circulation. When the overturning circulation decreases, the North Atlantic temperatures become cooler.”

http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/atlantic-multidecadal-oscillation-amo

There’s always been Nor Easters they just vary in intensity,
If they dump most of their snow burden in coastal waters its no biggie, if it dumps a buttload of snow in New York its snowmageddon.
Massachusetts gets dumped on more than most, and to a greater or lesser extent not necessarily connected to global temperatures. As the snow measurements for the last storm have shown some parts of Massachusetts got less than 5″ while a few miles away they got 30+”.

Like they say in real estate its location location location.

I’ve seen a video showing a solar enhanced steam generator.
Sunlight is reflected and focused directly onto the boiler greatly reducing the amount of heat needed to bring the water to full boil.
Another simple method of heating water for household use is to run black plastic tubing back and forth along the side of a roof that gets the most sunlight during the day. The water from the tubing runs into the water heater.

But one thing I find odd is that methane emissions are seldom mentioned, perhaps because so much of it comes from natural sources and agriculture.
People have to eat.
Much of the methane comes from rice paddies, some more comes from marsh lands and swamps. Yet those who want to save the environment would have a stoke if anyone suggested draining the swamps.
Out law rice paddies and you’d really see some billions up in arms.

“I strongly discount centralized Big Nuclear with the type of dirty, damaging, and dangerous reactors that became the norm — Perhaps it is only a personal belief but I feel that large-scale fission of uranium is invariably not about ‘clean’ and affordable energy so much as the desire to put more Peace™ into bombs. ”
Yep we were all promised safe clean nuclear power, the we get Three mile Island and Chernobyl .
If they did manage to get a lot of new nuclear power stations online we’d have good times then, a two headed chicken in every pot.
Main problem is that no matter how many safe guards they install Homer Simpson will be in the control room.
If a major earthquake breaches a containment dome its Wormwood all over again.

At present even the sudden disappearance of all of man’s industries and agriculture wouldn’t guarantee an end to Global Warming. It would guarantee an end to mankind’s civilization.
We could then have that fourth world war Einstein spoke of.
Best we gather a good pile of rocks while we can.

You will find it is not that easy to find any strong correlations between the SSTs around and above Iceland and the SSTs on the US East Coast.

The eastern tip of Iceland is normally ice free due to it being at the furthest west border of the milder Norwegian sea.

So was there any indication of the sort of situation we see in more recent years?

According to this sea surface temps were lower and sea ice extent was much greater in the 1960s than in recent years.
Which is to be expected.
http://mashable.com/2014/10/21/scientists-1960s-satellite-climate-data/
But there were also as yet unexplained holes in that coverage.

Maybe we’ll get a more complete picture when they have finished restoring all those old cold war satellite images.

At the risk of overstepping, I would like to point out that places such as Amsterdam, New Orleans, and Venice seem to have staved off their watery fate using the technology and construction techniques at hand.

*I don’t discount hydroelectric though it sometimes comes with a different set of environmental problems. I have become a little more wary of SO2/NOx than perhaps I’ve been in the past (Your post of Gail Zawacki’s Ghosting Trees is pretty powerful) — The argument that electric vehicles don’t really solve anything due to only shifting the effluence of power generation elsewhere seem weak in regions with existing hydro infrastructure.

I strongly discount centralized Big Nuclear with the type of dirty, damaging, and dangerous reactors that became the norm — Perhaps it is only a personal belief but I feel that large-scale fission of uranium is invariably not about ‘clean’ and affordable energy so much as the desire to put more Peace™ into bombs.

While I’m not so keen on coal, I do confess a love of the steam turbine and the simplicity of efficient external combustion. Development of geothermal, ground exchange heat pumps, Stirling cycle based engines and generators, Peltier, Seebeck, and Thomson thermoelecric devices for the laptop, birds, bees, flowers, and trees; A Steampunk’s Utopia.

I recognize there should be room left for Nature — That is one virtue that, thus far, Humanity as a whole has proven unable, uncaring, or unwilling to claim.

I recognize that this is the world we have. But must we really adhear to Gates’ CO2=PSEC and reduce P to zero to all get along? I’d say not if CO2 in and of itself is not leading to change which is insurmountable. War certainly is not carbon neutral; We have allowed ourselves to be conditioned to believe that P needs to tend more toward zero for us all to get along anyways.

I realize that colonization of our other heavenly bodies seems all but a faded fantasy save for those few elite ‘non terrestrial officers’ who may already secretly be there. Militarized. Harrumph. Technology aside, there would only be a corporofascist federal overreach and space-grabbing by the Space Management Bureau under the guise of protecting ET anyways.