What Cuba needs

I understand the Obama administration, its "progressive" supporters, agribusiness and corporate interests, cruise ship lines, and the mainstream media allied with these factions think the USA should abandon current economic sanctions against the Castro family dictatorship. But I think the following key items are needed at this time: 

• The unconditional release of all political prisoners and the repeal of all laws that violate fundamental freedoms.
• Freedom of speech, press, association, assembly, peaceful demonstration, profession and religion.
• And end of special privileges and status for the Communist Party and its members.
• The participation of the people in every decision of the nation, the legalization of all political parties and free and multiparty elections.

These changes are needed because Obama's proposal will strengthen the dictatorship, and allow a transfer of power from Raul Castro to his son Alejandro, and on to younger Castro generations. 

 The two Castro dinosaurs 

Alejandro Castro, Raul's son and next

 in line to sit in the Castro throne.

Their plan is to cement themselves in power with USA assistance, and screw the people forever. 

Climate Disaster Propaganda Design.

The Guardian, a British newspaper with an intensive focus on global warming has published a well crafted climate disaster propaganda piece "Food production shocks will happen more often because of extreme-weather". I've written this post to show you the link between the IPCC decision to create the exaggerated RCP8.5 projection, and the proliferation of papers, reports, and magazine articles discussing climate change, all of them based on what amounts to bogus science.

The article quotes a study published by the "UK-US Task Force on Global Extreme Weather and Global Food System Resilience". From what I gather this study was financed by the UK government. The leading authors are Tim G. Benton, Leeds University, Rob Bailey, Chatham House, Joshua Elliott, University of Chicago, Aled Jones, Anglia Ruskin University, and Kirsty Lewis, Met Office UK. The full report is here: http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/assets/pdfs/extreme-weather-resilience-of-global-food-system.pdf

The study appears to be pretty professional. It does use subliminal messages, such as two men chopping dried out ground, like this:

Salt harvesting in the Danakil depression, Eritrea, 

In the Horn of Africa (from avaxnews.net)

The study uses a climate model ensemble. They don't go into any detail, but they provide a reference (#16). If we search that reference we get to this webpage ("Agricultural Model  Intercomparison Project") https://www.agmip.org/ag-grid/ggcmi/. This Project is described in more detail in this brochure: http://www.agmip.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/GGCMI-Flyer2013417.pdf

The brochure explains this effort uses the future climate data prepared for the UN's IPCC 2014 report (known as AR5). The climate model data they use is the CMIP-RCP8.5. And there's the rub. The IPCC invented an extreme case, with CO2 and methane emissions way above what's reasonable. Their propaganda system calls this extreme case "Business as Usual", but I think it should be known as "Bullshit as Usual".

Karachi´s Heat Wave and Pakistan´s Energy Crisis

This page is presented to assist those who wish to debate whether the recent Karachi heat wave was caused by global warming,  or whether it´s just part of a normal trend. The temperature anomaly data from the Hadley center runs through 2014, but I don´t think a temperature spike in 2015 is very meaningful, and the debaters should focus on the temperature anomaly trend.

The post also includes links to articles about Pakistan´s electric power crisis (they are having a shortfall), their efforts to install renewables (which deliver less than 1 % of national electricity needs), and the Pakistan-China deal to build coal fired power plants to relieve Pakistan´s electric power crisis.

The two sectors of interest cover the region around Karachi. This is a piece of a screen print taken from the Google Earth display, the stars show the sectors I am focusing on. 

Figure 1. Google Earth Grid, Edited Screen Print. 

Disastrous sea level rise threatens planet

I have been reading about sea level rise and the horrible threat it poses to people living by the sea. This topic has turned hot in recent times, after famous climate scientist James Hansen published a paper about the subject.

The above paragraph is the hook. Now I'm going to show you the photograph to impress you even more:

Sea level is rising. The photograph doesn't show it because it's a very slow process. So I'm going to show you two plots. One is the sea level rise since 1900. The data shows sea level rose almost 250 mm (almost ten inches!).

The other plot shows sea level history going way back to the ice ages. This plot shows sea level rose a lot (120 meters, about 400 feet) when the giant ice glaciers that covered North America, Europe, and Asia melted.