Here are several current sources that I look at just about every day, sources that I think that even the pro-fracking crowd could benefit from looking at too:

North America Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly for August 31st, 2015, above 1971-1999 average.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--vh1uPYr24w/VeVrW82jU2I...

NOAA/NWS Arctic Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly, above 1961-1990 baseline, for August 31st. Dark gray-shaded areas are more than 8 C above baseline. Just off Svalbard (62 degrees north latitude) the sea-surface temperature is as high as 63 F, while at several locations in the Bering Sea SST is as high as 56-58 F, with historic norms in both locations no higher than 39-41 F.

Worse yet, the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea, and the East Siberian Sea are all running as much as 6 C above baseline, right above the world's largest continental shelf, where 25 times as much thawing seafloor methane as it would take to extinct the human race exists.

Today the remnant post-tropical remains of Typhoon Gori are subjecting the Bering Sea to winds gusting to 50 knots and waves up to 25 feet, and the forecast track takes the storm into the Arctic Ocean over the weekend where it will dump lots of warm rain and batter the remaining Arctic ice-cap with more high surf when that region used to be frozen solid at this time of year just 20 years ago.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XwuPhtBDNNs/VeV_tp_VUDI...

US Drought Monitor, August 25th, 2015, kind of tough to conduct regional sustainability planning when nearly 40 million people just across the western US are in imminent danger of running out of fresh water.
https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1...

This whole thing is a whole lot larger than just Colorado, fracking, and where your next paycheck is coming from.

Part Two

Even here in urban Front Range Colorado our Denver Basin Aquifer only has less than 15 years to exist and the High Plains Aquifer at our latitude won't last but another decade after the Denver Basin Aquifer is depleted too, which then will only leave us annual surface runoff as mountain snow levels continue to climb, likely by another 1000-2000 feet vertically by mid-century, and evaporation rates on surface water supplies also spike as the average temperature rises. Once both aquifers are depleted northeastern, eastern, and southeastern Colorado except very close to rivers rapidly becomes a dust bowl. Water rights won't mean anything after State government is forced to declare an emergency, likely coming as soon as the Denver Basin Aquifer is depleted. Denver Water has already forecast that to occur between 2027 and 2030.

The elephant in the room that very few recent climate change predictions want to include in their forecasts is what happens when tens of thousands of years worth of carbon and methane long-trapped in the frozen Arctic thaws. Already just since 2006 annual Arctic natural methane emissions have increased by more than 300%, and in the very short term methane can trap up to 1000 times as much heat in our lower atmosphere as carbon dioxide does over a 10-year time frame following emission. These methane releases across the Arctic are ongoing daily, as they are from the oil & gas industry, the livestock industry, the palm oil industry, the paper industry, and other industries. Half of all abandoned oil & gas wells leak methane.

Numerous competing Arctic climate scientists and oceanographers have agreed that the total methane content frozen into Arctic permafrost and shallow-depth sea-floors is 25-40 times the amount necessary to extinct the human race if all of it was released fairly quickly. If even 1% of the known stockpile were to be released in just one summer, the impact on global temperatures would be an additional 2-3 Celsius.

So just take the median forecast of any of the above climate change studies from many respected institutions for mid-century and add 2-3 C to it, and we are right into a major catastrophe where several billion people die, which then causes additional Arctic warming and additional catastrophic methane releases the following year until everyone alive on the planet's surface is dead, which only leaves maybe 1/4 million people still alive in various nuclear bomb-proof bunkers worldwide, unable to venture outside for another 10-15 generations and perhaps longer, as every operational nuclear plant will melt down shortly after that 2nd summer after there are no humans left to tend to them.

And worst part of this whole scenario is that right now there is a small chance that it could occur yet this summer, as well as a somewhat larger chance that it could occur next summer, and it is a virtual certainly to happen before mid-century too unless the human race can cut global GHG emissions by 80-90% and then chew our fingernails off for the next 40 years waiting for natural carbon uptake to remove enough carbon and CO2e from our atmosphere to stabilize rapidly rising temperatures.

Why do you pro-fracking types want to do as little as possible to work away from this looming disaster that will kill all of us?

Part One

The IPCC has major problems and I wouldn't trust their reports on several grounds. For one the IPCC does not include any scientific information that is less than 3 years old, which means that AR5 did not include the record Arctic sea-ice melt summers of 2011 or 2012. Another huge problem with the IPCC is their political approval process where the findings of their scientists are vetted by politicians with the power to squelch findings. There have been dozens of IPCC scientists that have protested the amount of scientific material removed in the publication of AR5.

How about we instead discuss the findings of the US National Climate Assessment (2014). the IEA-WEO climate assessments from 2013 and 2015, or the US Department of National Intelligence Global Trends 2030 studies, the CU/CIRES, CSU., and NCAR climate change impacts on water supply study for Colorado for mid-century from 2015, as well as quite a few other professional, academic, and governmental climate change studies that all have made recent findings in-excess of the findings released through the political vetting process at the IPCC?

Let's discount IPCC AR5 for a minute and just figure the median findings of the other studies that I named above. The CU/CIRES study from earlier this year is predicting between 2.9 and 5.1 Celsius worth of Colorado temperature rise by mid-century above the common 1880 baseline with an already-observed 2.8 F rise from 1880 through last January., and they have also forecast a med-century Statewide water-supply shortage based on a fairly conservative rate of population increase of between 215,000 and 360,000 acre-feet annually, enough to supply the annual fresh water needs of between 1.6 and 2.6 million people. I say conservative because their findings DO NOT include any figure for Colorado being forced to accept refugees from places south and southwest of us that exhaust their own water supply or see their food supply collapse due to climate change impacts.

IEA-WEO 2013 forecast between 3.6 and 5.3 Celsius worth of global average temperature rise by 2100, (median 4.45 C), and IEA-WEO-2015 has updated their earlier finding to between 3.9 and 7.6 Celsius worth of global average temperature rise by 2100 (median of 5.75 Celsius, which would be fatal for 5-7 billion people only after immense refugee flows and huge wars over remaining resources. For those of you who don't know, the International Energy Agency is a 28-nation energy policy coordinating agency based in Paris, France that the US is a member of.

Among the most-stark of the findings made by Global Trends 2030 (US-NSA, 2012), was the finding that in-order for global population growth to continue on a 2.5% annual rate that by 2030 the human race will have to find or produce 40% more food than was produced in 2011, come-up with 40% more fresh water than existed in 2011, and also come up with 35% more energy than was produced in 2011 also. Their findings have since been backed-up by other organizations and mind you, 2011 was before the immense drought that has hit the west coasts of Mexico, the US, and Canada since then too.

The US National Climate Assessment found a 2.5 Celsius global average temperature rise by between 2052 and 2057 along with more than double that in polar regions, both north and south, which will cause about one meter of sea-level rise for every degree Celsius of additional temperature rise in polar regions. US-NCA also found immense fresh water shortages globally caused by the rising temperatures and greater evaporation rates, in-fact, their research teams were worried about the amount of water used by the electric power industry in power plant cooling, as they said that amount would eventually conflict with the water supply needs of continuing to supply urban areas west of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.

Now let's discuss Ackerman & Stanton of the Stockholm Resilience Center and their 2011 study of Southwestern US water supply, which was also done before the big west coast drought began. By 2100 they forecast is for a western US fresh water supply shortage in-excess of 28 million acre-feet annually, with just 15 million acre-feet of annual fresh water supply shortage in California alone, enough to supply the annual fresh water needs of 120 million people in California alone, and 232 million people across the western US alone.

You assume too much. My grandfather owned both a truckline with a terminal in Denver and cattle ranches in Colorado and Kansas both, and employed people in Colorado, as well as in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Iowa, and while he and my grandmother lived in Kansas City, they did own summer property here in Colorado and I made numerous visits here during the 1960s and 1970s before first moving here in 1982.

I am well aware that metro-Denver did not used to be nearly as large as it is today, in-fact when I first moved here in 1982 Chambers Rd was the far limit of east suburban Denver and just north of 120th Ave there were a few homes set on large lots of several acres minimum with the other land being farmland. I remember when the Westlake and Eagle Golf Club neighborhoods were built in Broomfield and at the time there was protest from the agricultural and extraction industry too, Yet now metro-Denver's urban fringe has reached at least 10 miles north of 136th Ave too.

I remember when Parker was a small town with a 2-lane road through the middle of town, and now that road is 6 lanes surrounded by neighborhoods sitting atop historic O & G rights for 10 miles around, and one of my earliest jobs here in 1982 was hauling lumber from a railhead that Alpine Lumber used to operate on Blakeland Rd off of Santa Fe, long before any urban development existed south of Dry Creek Rd and long before E-470 or Highlands Ranch were built too.

Perhaps you are right and new homes should not be built within safe airborne toxic chemical distance of active producing wells, which would be considerably further than just 1000 feet, probably one-half mile or more would be much safer. How about we define an active producing well and further define an abandoned well, and not let your industry or the coal industry try to reopen abandoned wells or mines beyond a certain time frame and/or in the case of major surface land-use change?

As the issue is whether to allow the fracking industry to re-enter areas that have seen such a substantial land use change since previous wells were drilled and abandoned that re-entering such areas now presents extreme catastrophic risk, (one in 2500) as well as substantial negative health and property value impacts to newer surface owners that would otherwise be excluded by protective zoning.

Not only the fracking industry either, as if it ever became necessary to mine coal here again, today entire neighborhoods and even cities are built atop shallow coal rights today too. Imagine having to tear down both Vista Ridge and Anthem to access historic coal mining rights below both subdivisions, as the value of the lost housing, commercial property, and the golf course would exceed the value of potential coal extracted by 25-40 times. Might have to tear down substantial parts of Superior, Louisville, Lafayette, Erie, Frederick and Firestone in order to strip mine any remaining coal too.

What is the difference between the coal industry wanting to come back in and reopen long-abandoned coal mines (the Eagle Mine closed in 1979), and the O & G industry wanting to come back in and redrill long-abandoned O & G wells in what are now expensive medium-density urban suburbs that were only built after the extraction industry abandoned their properties because at the time there was no profitable technology available to continue operating, as neither the coal industry nor the O & G industry can come back in to access long-abandoned properties without substantial damage to newer surface property owners?

Existing abandoned wells that had been abandoned many years earlier because there was no technology available at that time to continue to profitably extract any more oil & gas from those wells? By your rationale half of metro-Denver shouldn't exist today including the entire northeast, east, and southeast sides of the city as well as a couple smaller locations on the southwest side of downtown Denver too, because they all sit atop abandoned oil & gas reserves that new technology has possibly made profitable to extract again.

Actually AChem, I am not that far behind you academically, and frankly either the human race reduces global fossil fuel use by 80-90% by 2030-2035 at the latest, or by 2050-2060 as many as 3-5 billion people will be forced from their homes including right here in Colorado, as well as large numbers of people from every State or Country to our south or southwest, as rapidly rising global temperatures and rapidly worsening drought deplete fresh water supplies, kill crops and vegetation, and the topsoil is blown off by the wind and the land that 100 million people or more live-on today just on the North American continent is dead.

What would the economic impact of the US losing several of its 20-largest cities to depletion of water supply be smart guy, especially as the US is a signatory on a UN covenant that forces us to accept legitimate climate change and natural disaster refugees too. How many of Mexico's 10-largest urban areas are in imminent danger of running out of enough water to continue to supply half of their current population, and what is the average urban annual rate of growth there?

It is pretty obvious that you are a fossil fuel industry troll AChem, as one of the favorite arguments of fossil fuel industry trolls is the economic damage that will be inflicted if we discontinue fossil fuel use. The problem is that the economic damage from discontinuing fossil fuel use is far smaller than the economic damage worldwide from losing half or more of heavily populated land, as the other half can't begin to support double the population at even a starvation level of rations, which means billions of people will die only after immense refugee flows and huge wars over remaining resources too.

The oil wells in Los Angeles were there more than 100 years ago and the city grew up around them, getting lied-to by the O&G industry the entire time about the alleged safety of drilling in close proximity to homes and schools, whereas here, your industry wants to use new technology to reopen long abandoned wells that were abandoned because they were unprofitable to operate, across urban neighborhoods that only grew-up after your wells were abandoned.

What about numerous recent scientific findings that have tripled the amount of hazardous chemicals that Los Angeles residents are exposed-to due to your industry there, other recent scientific findings that have found that 5-7% of all fracking wells suffer underground cementing failures immediately due to high-pressure fracking, other studies that have found a 33-50% cementing failure rate underground at 50 years of age after drilling, and other new studies that have found that up to half of all oil & gas wells leak methane at a half-century of age too, considering that methane in the short term following emission can trap up to 1000 times as much heat in our lower atmosphere as does carbon dioxide ten years after emission?

Six of the last eight months have been the hottest respective months on record, 2014 was the hottest year on record, and July, 2015 was the hottest month ever in modern recorded history. Just this summer already globally we have seen in-excess of 60 million acres of timber lost to wildfire, a sum that is wildly larger than 2014, and as much as 5-8 times what the norm was just 30 years ago. Obviously your fossil fuel industry trolls don't believe in climate change, but I am afraid that almost everyone else does, and we still live in a country with majority rule too.

As i said, either the human race reduces global greenhouse gas outputs by 80-90% by 2030-2035 despite any economic damage incurred, or by 2050 to 2060 billions of people will die, including quite a few of our own kids here in Colorado too after we are subjected to a massive refugee influx as tens of millions of people to our south and southwest are driven from their homes by loss of their water and food supply.

I am a 2nd-year Master's student at the University of Colorado majoring in Regional Sustainability, focusing on regional western US and North American climate change impacts on food and water supply, and I already have 30 years of experience in national-scale wholesale fresh food supply chain and distribution logistics too.

I am obviously no spring chicken AChem just so that you know. If you want to have an academic argument get some respected ethically-researched sources out and lets argue their merits, rather than having you just continue to call everyone else on here stupid without any academic backing. Don't bother using known denier sources or anything from Energy in Depth either as their sources are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry just as you are too.

Developmental and reproductive effects of chemicals associated with unconventional oil and natural gas operations

Ellen Webb1 / Sheila Bushkin-Bedient2 / Amanda Cheng1 / Christopher D. Kassotis3 / Victoria Balise3 / Susan C. Nagel4

1Center for Environmental Health, New York, USA

2Institute for Health and the Environment 5 University Place Suite A 217, Rensselaer, New York, USA

3University of Missouri – Biological Sciences, Columbia, Missouri, USA

4University of Missouri – Obstetrics, Gynecology and Women’s Health Missouri, Illinois, USA

Corresponding authors: Sheila Bushkin-Bedient, Institute for Health and the Environment 5 University Place Suite A 217, Rensselaer, New York, USA, E-mail: (email); and Susan C. Nagel: University of Missouri – Obstetrics, Gynecology and Women’s Health Missouri, Illinois, USA, E-mail: (email)

Citation Information: Reviews on Environmental Health. Volume 29, Issue 4, Pages 307–318, ISSN (Online) 2191-0308, ISSN (Print) 0048-7554, DOI: 10.1515/reveh-2014-0057, December 2014
http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/reveh.2014.29.iss...

Got another question for you Gene. How come the O&G industry in Colorado is allowed to get away with huge amounts of contamination including dozens of cases where groundwater contamination has been proven beyond any doubt and your still industry still outright lies in the media?

How come several immense O&G hazmat spills recently have received absolutely no media coverage? Did you know that Encana floated and ruptured a produced water tank in Erie back in June that has caused groundwater under the spill site to be contaminated at 740 times the legal standard for benzene, and at 80-100 times the legal standard for a dozen other toxic or cancer-causing chemicals too, within 500 feet of a half-dozen water supply wells and an irrigation canal? Would that be OK in your neighborhood?

How the heck would any driller clean up such a spill in an urban neighborhood Gene, or would they just cut and run and then expect taxpayers to pay to fix the mess?

Did you hear about the giant spill that Pioneer Resources caused down west of Trinidad that polluted the Purgatorie River as well as Trinidad Lake, a water-supply reservoir? Strange how there was absolutely zero media coverage of a 504,000-gallon produced water spill because Pioneer was too cheap to buy new hoses as well as too cheap to maintain a 24-hour watch too. That spill happened on July 29th, 2015 and the only notice other than the State spill report was on the website of Trinidad Lake State Park that said that their campground would be closed until further notice because of the spill. Did you hear that Pioneer also spilled 30,000 gallons at a different well site there just 5 days earlier too?

The absolute craziest thing about whoever filled-out the State spill report for Pioneer to announce that 12,000 barrels had been spilled and only 80 barrels recovered due to a ruptured hose was how incredibly bad that they were on spelling common words in English. Good help hard to find these days or what?

Here is the State spill report for the spill west of Trinidad if you don't believe me:

ogccweblink.state.co.us/DownloadDocument.aspx?DocumentId=3654670

And here is the spill report for Encana's known case of groundwater pollution in Erie back in June too:
Toluene, Xylene, Benzene, all at levels massively in-excess of State and Federal EPA limits, would that be OK in your neighborhood Gene for royalties that average $100 per 10,000 square feet of property owned?
https://www.facebook.com/download/161845415839682...

[Quote] A paper published Friday in Reviews on Environmental Health.....suggests that even tiny doses of benzene, toluene and other chemicals released during the various phases of oil and natural gas production, including fracking, could pose serious health risks -- especially to developing fetuses, babies and young children.

"We hear a lot of anecdotal stories all the time," said Dr. Sheila Bushkin-Bedient, of the Institute for Health and the Environment at University at Albany-SUNY and co-author on the paper, "but now that we've had a decade of opportunity to observe the ill effects from these chemicals on people and animals, the evidence is no longer just anecdotal." [end quote]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/05/fracking...

So how about we ban fracking anywhere within airborne toxic chemical range to homes, schools, playgrounds, businesses, and large concentrations of people so that they aren't exposed to an obscene amount of toxic cancer-causing chemical risk?

Did we all know that the Erie spill is right next to I-25, or that everyone who has driven by there since late June may have been exposed to several airborne cancer-causing toxic chemicals at very high levels?

Wonder how much that will cost to fix Gene once the bad news hits the press?

The amount of royalties paid to each homeowner in a large subdivision just east of Longmont in Weld County started-out at $600/year in 2009, and last year had fallen to $80/year. You figure it out, does $2000 worth of O&G royalties make up for the loss of 20-25% of your property value, your family's loss of health due to toxic chemical emissions, and other problems such as local roads receiving 20-30 years worth of wear in only one summer from all of the industry trucks involved? Face it, to the average homeowner on a 10,000 square foot lot, O&G royalties are a sick joke.

How about O&G companies pay local property owners their property value and health impacts of drilling in urban neighborhoods up-front before being allowed to drill?

Let's see, if Vista Ridge has 2000 homes at an average value of $500K, and the average home loses 20% of its value when the drilling industry invades a neighborhood zoned against industrial use, just multiply 2000 times $100,000, which yields $200 million, and then add $25K per person impacted by immense illegal quantities of benzene, methane, VOC emissions, and other dangerous chemicals that residents are anywhere near fracking operations are forcibly subjected-to (4,000 people times $25K equals another $100 million), and then add the cost of repaving all of our local roads (another 25 million), and the cost of permanently contaminated water supply (another $250 million) and pretty soon drilling in urban neighborhoods becomes completely impossible from a financial standpoint.

Why should local cities and their residents be forced to take such an immense financial and health impacts hit ($475 million in Vista Ridge alone) just so that the extraction industry can make an extra buck at great expense to everyone else involved?

Did you see this piece: " World's top firms cause $2.2tn of environmental damage, report estimates"
Report for the UN into the activities of the world's 3,000 biggest companies estimates one-third of profits would be lost if firms were forced to pay for use, loss and damage of environment
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/1...

Or how about this news item? "None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use"?
http://grist.org/business-technology/none-of-the-...

How about this 2015 finding from the IMF? " Fossil fuels subsidised by $10 million a minute, says IMF". ‘Shocking’ revelation finds $5.3 Trillion subsidy estimate for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/1...

How about the fossil fuel industry give up its subsidies and pay the full value of its incurred damage to our common environment and if your industry can't do so and make a profit, then perhaps we shouldn't allow your industry to continue to damage our only planet at such an immense cost to the rest of us?

Let me ask you a question there GPPCI. When during high-pressure fracking operations well-cementing gives-out (as has been proven to occur in 5-7% of all O&G wells fracked), whose fault is it, the fracking operator or the well cementing contractor?

Before you answer consider this fact: The general public doesn't care whose fault it is, as it wouldn't have occurred unless the well was drilled in the first place, often far too-close to homes, schools, businesses, and large crowds of people, which is why more than 300,000 Colorado voters wanted to place a 2000-foot setback issue on the November, 2014 ballot before we got reamed by Governor Frackenlooper, a closet Republican bought by the O&G industry, and believe me, we won't make the same mistake as to give any one man control over the petitions on the day that they are to be turned-in come next August either.

Hey, did you see this current news item from Pennsylvania where they advocated for a one mile setback between the O&G drilling industry and schools?

Fracking near schools
DEP fails to keep drillers a healthy distance from children
August 24, 2015 12:00 AM
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh, PA
http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/Op-Ed/2015/08...

Considering that the fracking industry has often polluted our air and water (including Encana massively polluting groundwater just east of Erie earlier in the summer, with benzene levels over 700 times the State limit, as well as with several other chemicals at very high levels too, within 400 feet of a half-dozen water supply sources including an irrigation canal, and 11 sources within 1100 feet), why shouldn't there be a setback of a responsible distance established between your industry and the general public?

Care to comment on the fact that 1 in 2500 fracking wells has suddenly exploded into a huge fireball, or on why we need to take such a high chance near homes and schools, a chance 4 times as high as your chance of winning Pick 4 is?

What do you tell the residents west of Trinidad after a produced water spill of a half-million gallons pollutes the Purgatorie River and Trinidad Lake? Do you start pointing your fingers at each other rather than taking full responsibility no-matter whose fault it was? (Pioneer Resources, that's whose fault it was, as well as another similar spill of only 30,000 gallons five days earlier, both in the last week of July).

Did you read a couple of weeks ago when OSHA released a study that said that the average fracking worker has four times the rate of certain cancers and birth defects in offspring as the general public has?

Sounds to me like some people are so desperate that they can't see beyond their next paycheck. Something else I have been wanting to ask a fracking worker is how many corners does your industry have to cut in-order to still make a profit at a wholesale price for oil at under $39/barrel, and a wholesale price for natural gas of under $2.70 too?

Like I said GPPCI, the general public doesn't care whose fault it is when things go wrong in the fracking industry, all we care about is our health, our safety, and the impact to our property values of having your industry far too close to our homes, schools, neighborhoods, and to where our kids play too.