Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719

Hi! Bye!

just starting to read it now, but it's by bill mckibben, so it's going to be a good read. the man is truly a hero.

i would say its scary but its way beyond that. kind of an r.i.p. earth dispatch really.

"In early June, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled on a Norwegian research trawler to see firsthand the growing damage from climate change. "Many of the predictions about warming in the Arctic are being surpassed by the actual data," she said, describing the sight as "sobering." But the discussions she traveled to Scandinavia to have with other foreign ministers were mostly about how to make sure Western nations get their share of the estimated $9 trillion in oil (that's more than 90 billion barrels, or 37 gigatons of carbon) that will become accessible as the Arctic ice melts. Last month, the Obama administration indicated that it would give Shell permission to start drilling in sections of the Arctic."

well that's good news, at least

we're fucked

all that pesky arctic ice was hiding all the oil!

it's why if you talk to people who work on climate change (people at environmental nonprofits, climate scientists, think tanks), everyone has this attitude that's beyond fatalistic. like, you almost have to laugh at the situation a little bit to keep yourself from going insane. i guess the article talks about that a bit:

We're in the same position we've been in for a quarter-century: scientific warning followed by political inaction. Among scientists speaking off the record, disgusted candor is the rule. One senior scientist told me, "You know those new cigarette packs, where governments make them put a picture of someone with a hole in their throats? Gas pumps should have something like that."

but yeah, it's absurd. in 2010, my dad told me "you know who Obama should appoint for secretary of energy? Sarah Palin. i don't agree with her about a lot of stuff, but she has really good ideas about energy." my dad's kind of an outlier i guess, because he's a super fundamentalist who believes the earth is 8000 years old and doesn't believe that climate change could happen because god promised not to flood the earth again, and even if environmental catastrophe did occur, he'd be raptured out of it (the "pre-wrath rapture" theory") before the shit hit the fan. but man, there are a toooooooon of really ignorant people out there that don't want to hear anything that's bad news.

it really is up to the governments of the world. all of them. the average person is too far gone to really change things. i'm too far gone! he mentions that moral outrage over the loss of a city due to climate-related storms would change opinion, although there has already been mass devastation to cities due to super storms and it hasn't changed anyone's mind about anything. plus, for some reason people don't want to make the connection. major damage due to warming doesn't make people hate the oil companies.

this is increasingly all I think about and it leaves me in a heavy depression. I try to be fatalistic about it and tell myself that the universe will go on regardless, but that's not comfort since I guess one day it will be a dark grey cold mass of atoms.

i find it near-impossible to imagine a government stepping in to take the necessary action against oil companies in liberal socialist Europe, there's absolutely no chance in hell it wd happen in the US or China

all the news stories here about the drought are about how you might be paying more at the pump in the future! that is the number one concern. oh and food prices are gonna go up. that takes second place.

thats really the frustrating part; it really seems like as a planet we could buckle down and fix things, we just won't

whenever I hear the phrase "the price at the pump" it makes me insane. was looking at various political parties' platforms, and of course in the energy section for the democrats' paper there is little mention of climate change, and instead just talk about energy security, independence, and yes, the "price at the pump."

It sounds like it may be coming to a head in the US soon if next year's corn harvest may be fucked.

I am curious what the thinking inside China is - I oddly expect more of them than the US, partly because I don't associate them with "Oh God won't let that happen".

I remember having my huge bout of paralyzed fear about the environment in early 1992 -- still always associate the Church's stellar Priest = Aura with that, probably why that album has lingered with me for so long. I don't see myself returning to that state anymore because it's almost like...well, I went through it, and my fears never went away. I just became inured, and so I'll just live my life as low impact as possible and...wait.

xpost but it's up to people to force their governments to act.

what i'm dreading even more than the world that we'll have to live in for the rest of our lives - where the new normal is weeks on end of 100+ degrees, droughts, Katrinas, oceanic foodchains ruined by acidification, climate refugees struggling to move to the remaining pockets of the world where agriculture isn't wrecked - is the geoengineering "solutions" that will inevitably arise. it's so obvious that that's where we're headed. and no doubt, geoengineering efforts will probably be pushed by exxon-mobil and the like.

what is the true percentage of people in the US that believe god is protecting us though? I feel that there are many who just don't want to admit the truth because it is terrifying, or are just susceptible to listening to whichever account of events is least traumatizing. I figure it's quite a minority who really believe that God Himself will prevent any ecological disaster, even if a majority of Americans identify as religious.

xxpost

like most Americans are religious, but not thaaaaat religious, right? I mean most people just like to say they believe in god and attend church once in a while. right guys??

now I think I'm fooling myself maybe

i need a drink after reading this

I get the impression that it works on a lower/earlier level, like as long as there's FUD about climate change, people can react to it as "one story is this, and one story is that, but God would not put us in the situation where Story 1 happens so it must be Story 2"

I am curious what the thinking inside China is - I oddly expect more of them than the US, partly because I don't associate them with "Oh God won't let that happen".

also because their leadership would actually have the ability to unilaterally "force" action on the issue. don't know if they'd actually do it, but at least it's possible.

there was a nyer stat about 26% (iirc) of americans defining themselves as evangelicals, recently (xxxp)

hey Z S, sorry to use you as a lazy wikipedia substitute, BUT, is it correct that the limited action that was taken by governments after the discovery of the hole in the o-zone layer was actually effective? that stat always seemed slightly reassuring to me, because i couldn't believe that anyone did a lot, but the idea that some modest action was effective seemed promising.

these are some of the people in power in the united states. just so we are clear:

In 2009, for the first time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce surpassed both the Republican and Democratic National Committees on political spending; the following year, more than 90 percent of the Chamber's cash went to GOP candidates, many of whom deny the existence of global warming. Not long ago, the Chamber even filed a brief with the EPA urging the agency not to regulate carbon – should the world's scientists turn out to be right and the planet heats up, the Chamber advised, "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations." As radical goes, demanding that we change our physiology seems right up there.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce is horrible for many reasons, not least of which is that they fool people into thinking they're an actual gov't agency!

Not long ago, the Chamber even filed a brief with the EPA urging the agency not to regulate carbon – should the world's scientists turn out to be right and the planet heats up, the Chamber advised, "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations." As radical goes, demanding that we change our physiology seems right up there.

as cynical as i am about the intelligence of our conservative political leaders, i think that many of them really do understand the implications of climate change. as time goes on and denying climate change becomes more and more absurd - think about the first warnings about cigarettes and cancer in the late 50s, the loooooooong conservative battle against those scientists who were trying to save lives, and then the gradual, quiet acceptance of the facts in the following decades - the rhetoric will quickly shift to geoengineering "solutions", since by then it will be too late to actually effectively mitigate climate change by reducing CO2 emissions. hell, it's probably already too late NOW, when you take into account tipping points/feedback loops. anyway, they'll be happy to move straight to geoengineering, because that's a pro-business attitude that doesn't involve changing your own lifestyle.

http://adsoftheworld.com/files/sony.start_.new_.tunnel20.jpg

wait did ned just say that he made his peace with the destruction of the planet via an australian college rock band from the 80's?

sounds about right

You gotta start somewhere.

hey Z S, sorry to use you as a lazy wikipedia substitute, BUT, is it correct that the limited action that was taken by governments after the discovery of the hole in the o-zone layer was actually effective? that stat always seemed slightly reassuring to me, because i couldn't believe that anyone did a lot, but the idea that some modest action was effective seemed promising.

yes, the actions taken were relatively effective! but the experience is - cue negative nancy alert - unfortunately not very applicable to the problem of climate change. ozone depletion is primarily caused by the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Banning the use of CFCs in things like spray cans and refrigerators was relatively easy to accomplish, since there are chemical substitutes that could be used at a similar cost. and it was regulation that could be implemented quickly, from the top down, on industry.

climate change, on the other hand, is driven by the emission of greenhouse gases, primarily from burning coal and using oil. but the key is that the infrastructure required to deliver energy and car-centered transportation to the people is enormous. you can't change it overnight, and you can't do it in a way that consumers barely notice (like phasing out CFCs in spray cans). there are cleaner substitutes for coal and oil, of course, but the substitutes tend to be more expensive and will take a long time to replace to replace the existing infrastructure.

and also, there's just the sheer usefulness of fossil fuels. think about what a gallon of gasoline provides for you - it enables a weak, feeble human being to move a one ton automobile for 30 miles or so! imagine pushing that car! all from a gallon of fossilized ancient dead organisms! it's seriously amazing. and so incredibly cheap. $3 for access to superhuman powers. it's like playing videogames on god mode. people in underdeveloped countries understandably want access to oil and coal. again, all of this in contrast to CFCs, which could be eliminated without negatively impacting the prospects of a better life for anyone else.

xpost -- Said album was more of a vehicle and a lens, in that it builds up to a pretty harrowing ending. I don't know whether it matched my mood or enabled it, but I find it pretty inextricable in reflecting back, and anytime I encounter stories or concerns like this it's part of the soundtrack in my head.

If global warming is real, then why is it cold in winter? Huh? Fuck you, science.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4MCRrsmzYU

The first six months of 2012 were the hottest on record. Deke Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, takes a look at record warm temperatures across the county and the world and their connections to global warming.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2012/jul/11/weather/

The 'Dark Knight' shootings are terrifying and ppl will rightly be appalled by them but somehow climate change lacks the immediacy that would rightly make it that much more terrifying.

it's because what's predicted to happen has never happened before in human memory and so people just ignore it.

if you can scarcely conceptualize a threat then it's hard to motivate yourself to give up deeply ingrained habits and privileges to stop it.

i do wonder what sort of world the rest of my life will be spent in. will my neighbors and myself experience widespread privation? or will life in america just become marginally more difficult, with our wealth and technology insulating ourselves from the worst of it? will my diet change thanks to rolling food shortages? will we all simply die of malnutrition in 40 years?

3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

he sorta blows his math cred in the second sentence. that number is almost zero.

odds are expressed as a fraction of 1 iirc

agree. the odds are small, not large. an editor should have picked that up.

Dodgy formatting imo, should it be 3.7 x 10^99:1? Or 3.7 x 10:99? Or what?

more proof that this is all a hoax

Sorry, I've got my stupid head on and didn't read the sentence properly. Yes, it makes no sense as he has written it.

it makes sense it's just inaccurate. he shd've used odds against if he wanted to draw the stars comparison.

i mean, i knew what he meant, so it makes sense, and i squinted at the -99 index when i read it

so the warming deniers all think that its the sun's fault. the culprit is the sun. because the sun is in a warming cycle. who knows? maybe it is. kind of bad timing what with us also destroying the planet with carbon emissions.

it isn't.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-intermediate.htm

and in fact, over the last 30 years, forcing from the sun has actually shown a slight cooling trend, while global temperatures have steadily risen. global temperature used to be pretty correlated with the sun (for obvious reasons), until the latter part of the 20th century when the greenhouse effect really started to take hold. in other words, if there was no greenhouse effect, global temperatures would most likely have cooled slightly over the last 30 years.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Solar_vs_Temp_basic.gif

btw scott, and others who are interested, that website (skepticalscience.com) is a GREAT resource. it lists common arguments that people use (it's the sun, you can't rely on computer models, global warming will be good for people, etc) and then summarizes the science on the topic, organized by basic, intermediate and advanced levels of knowledge about the climate.

th eearth has a fever baby, and the cure is no mor ehumans!

ugh, why do i read through the comment section? why do i do this to myself? i tell myself that it's an opportunity to get a better sense of what people who don't really follow the issue closely actually think (at least if you can filter out the wingnuts), but even that is so frustrating. the very first one i see is:

well where I live its been a very mild summer, so dunno. The 3000 ish records broken sounds good, but out of how many reporting temerature change? How many reported record lows? to little info, to many ways the stats can be fudged.

i want to shake this person and say It doesn't matter what the temperature is where you live! it's global warming, not your town warming, and it's climate change, not weather change. and the record highs are piling up at a rate far exceeding the record lows:

http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/images/temps_2med.jpg

or

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/record-high-chart.jpg

or

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Wtz1uv3h7Ic/T2OLxtVncpI/AAAAAAAACrI/0H_mhLuIcaw/s1600/temp.records.031512.jpg

this whole thing seems like a tragedy in the strict sense, in that our collective failure to respond with sufficient speed to global warming is founded on some very basic cognitive biases that are very difficult to overcome.

speaking of which, training in interpreting statistics should be central to junior-high and high-school curricula.

or hell, elementary school curricula. as you learn math, you should also learn how it is applied, how it is represented in discourse, and how it can be manipulated/misused.

xpost
yeah, it's pretty much classic game theory here. on an individual level, everyone has an incentive to pollute and/or to not care, since the effect of one person living a zero-impact lifestyle really makes no difference on a global level, and it's less stressful to just continue living the way you want to, without any concern for the future. and on a industrial level, presently, it's cheaper and more profitable to use fossil fuels rather than clean energy alternatives (although that's quickly changing with some technologies). everyone has the incentive to create the worst possible outcome on a global level.

and of course, the traditional answer to that game theory dilemma is that policy/government must step in and shift the incentives. but politicians are playing their own terrible game, with the same terrible incentives.

no one gets votes for helping to prevent an amorphous future catastrophe.

i've been saying we need to tax CO2 emmissions for years, but yeah it's probably not going to happen

as a somewhat patriotic American it does upset me to see all this technology coming out of places like Germany and Denmark when I know that we have the intelligence and will and power to create a new economic and industrial revolution by dumping billions of bucks into renewable energy

Power definitely, intelligence possibly, will are you fucking kidding me?

or at least, we had the will; in the past when America's really wanted to get things done, it happens quickly, we need that wartime mentality back

there were some minor environmental things that were pushed through (minor enough that I can't remember what they are) under GWB's regime, if that's what you mean.

well where I live its been a very mild summer, so dunno. The 3000 ish records broken sounds good, but out of how many reporting temerature change? How many reported record lows? to little info, to many ways the stats can be fudged.

How does one even begin to reason with this sort of person? Even if you get them outside of "where they live" you still have to explain exponential change and other basic concepts to which they'll reply "to many ways the stats can be fudged".

yeah, it's a fool's errand. i used to respond to stuff like that all over the internet, and i don't think i ever succeeded in changing anyone's mind.

we have all the technology we need, frogbs. it's not about technology anymore, it's about manipulating the market to stave off disaster.

dipping back into the comments.

For everyone out there preaching denial and skepticism, it's because of you the planetary systems that have supported our civilization are crumbling, and you deserve any suffering that pursues. Unfortunately the millions of innocent bystanders - all the other living species that you share this world with will also suffer for your imbecility. May you rot in Hell eternally for your ignorance.

well, that's one way NOT to respond, i guess,

I just hope The Singularity occurs first and we merge painlessly into the computronium continuum.

i hope our new robot overlords properly configure their 0's and 1's to use a source of energy that won't become economically unfeasible to use in 20 years and won't cause the foundation of civilization to fall apart.

by the way, this is what happens when you actually try to engage:

hikerstud:

So is global warming responsible for the increase in mega earthquackes too?

kevin:

No... Earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes are geological events, not climatic ones...

hikerstud:

Exactly so geolical events are more frequent and violent than ever before along with climate events so it points to many systems including the economic or manmade systems all being shaken at once. But this is old news for anyone at all educated about the most influential person to ever walk the earth....Jesus Christ...also known as Emanual God with us. Whoever falls on the Son for mercy will be broken of pride and blindness but whoever the Son falls on will be crushed to powder. He was a carpenter but he is now the King of Kings and will return to restore all systems thankfully soon but until then it will be a very rocky boat ride and many like myself will be killed in the persecution by the rest of mankind who do not want to hear about a supreme being.

hikerstud is stoked that someone took the bait on that one

i can see his studly hands clapping together in ecstasy as he sees that "kevin" has responded

global warming is the machines way of killing us off so they can have the planet

I was dj'ing a friend's wedding in Virginia a few years back, his dad very wealthy with a younger wife. I'll never forget the conversation; she was nobody's fool, and she fully accepted climate change. She just thought that it was foolhardy to believe that mankind's behavior had any influence or impact on it. I tried to take on the conversation, but by the end of the conversation I had a lot of sympathy; what's going on is easily understood from a scientific viewpoint, but almost incomprehensible otherwise.

Also will never forget these tweets:

Copenhgen=arrogance of man2think we can change nature's ways.MUST b good stewards of God's earth,but arrogant&naive2say man overpwers nature [Palin Tweet, 12/19/09]

Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng [Palin Tweet, 12/19/09]

what do you guys think about the line of thought that people should just give up trying to change their minds and just press on the "MUST b good stewards of God's earth" option?

we have all the technology we need, frogbs. it's not about technology anymore, it's about manipulating the market to stave off disaster

right, and i'm not really sure what the next step is

Hey lefties, Greens, Libtards, DemocRATS, and other haters of the human race..

Unite, YOU HAVE THE KEY… Please do us all a favor, Save the planet with ONE SIMPLE idea.. DON'T REPRODUCE! It's that easy! Let me guess, why should YOU curtail your lifestyle right? I bet more than half of these responses were written in air conditioned comfort, including the article itself! So please, DON'T REPRODUCE… and thanks for saving the world.. you'll go straight to heaven.. oh yeah,, you don't believe in that nonsense… sorry..

how do you respond to that?

donate to planned parenthood in hikerdude's name + address?

what do you guys think about the line of thought that people should just give up trying to change their minds and just press on the "MUST b good stewards of God's earth" option?

might be work for a few people, but not effective overall. the bible can be interpreted so many ways, it's pointless. i mean, the Quoting Relevant Scripture approach doesn't even work with really obvious stuff, like fundamentalists who are afraid of anyone who's not a WASP, and then you're like "what about those things jesus said about loving everyone and washing the feet of prostitutes", and the response is, in effect, "but.....i hate gay people"

governments could make solar energy...more profitable? tax oil and give so many breaks for solar and other alternatives that it makes more sense to get out of the oil business? i have no idea.

i don't mean using arguments from scripture, i mean just re-selling pro-environmental policy to fit their worldview.

Religion is one of the worst social viruses in modern history and it's usefulness is now outweighed by its detrimental 'retarding force'.

i mean just re-selling pro-environmental policy to fit their worldview.

There are, tbf, plenty of progressive Xtians in the world, they just don't shout as loud and double-down on every dumb thing they can.

it seems like children are rebellious if you hate liberals you shoudl say REPRODUCE beucase their kids will rebel and be conservaties

Menonnites know what's up

governments could make solar energy...more profitable? tax oil and give so many breaks for solar and other alternatives that it makes more sense to get out of the oil business? i have no idea.

governments regulate markets, that is what needs to happen. that's what cap-and-trade is based on, essentially. Put a price on carbon emissions. there's a ton of ways to do this. all of them will decimate the fossil fuel industry's profits.

the political problem with that is obvious

McKibben (the author of the article) is a progressive christian, he's written for numerous christian magazines, and i think he was the editor on a book of essays about christianity and environmentalism. he wrote an essay in harper's a while back (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080695) about how he believes the bible contains all sorts of prescriptions to protect the earth, and generally to do progressive things, but christians end up ignoring most of them. i'm sure he reads hikerstud's posts and slams his head on the desk repeatedly.

well presumably hikerstud enjoys hiking, so why not recast policy as protecting the hills he enjoys hiking so much from evil chinese smog?

The market as eschaton is also just verifiably stupid. Markets are powerful and liberal economics are generally good but there are always caveats. Nobody should be dealing in viruses unchecked or slaves and just 'cause there's a market for hitmen doesn't mean that we should condone it or encourage it with tax breaks. We have all more or less agreed over the last few centuries that certain things are best done by the State; nat'l defense, firefighting, police, etc... When man-abetted or not climate catastrophe starts to occur, to insist that it's a plot to kill the free market is as ideologically blinkered as any Stalinist and they seriously need to get kicked in the nuts for it.

The 'Dark Knight' shootings are terrifying and ppl will rightly be appalled by them but somehow climate change lacks the immediacy that would rightly make it that much more terrifying.

― sive gallus et mulier (Michael White), Friday, July 20, 2012 11:52 AM

im switching to solar panels #foraurora

Xpost well, there is a movement to introduce family planning and provide birth control to countries that are reproducing at unsustainable rates

Yes but there's still the matter of all this oil...

semen + oil = cactus?

is it a form of political insanity i have to hope that some of the worst case AGW scenarios realize themselves just to shame the deniers?

not that i'm leaving my car running to bring them about or anything

I don't like this arrangement
Your wild schemes are nothing but pipe dreams
I don't like this arrangement
And we can't win without the kid

We need somebody
Somebody to watch our backs
We need somebody
We don't care what they did
We need somebody
Somebody like the kid

lol took me a second to recognize that

just in case anyone harbors any illusions that obama might give a shit about global warming, he put out a new radio ad today in ohio that criticizes Romney for not loving coal enough.

and of course, the impact of coal isn't limited to the dominant role in plays in releasing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere - coal plants also causes thousands upon thousands of pre-mature deaths, heart attacks, hospitalizations and asthma attacks each year.

but whatever. get re-elected. when people are wondering why the fuck we didn't do anything a few decades from now, they'll totally understand that he needed to get re-elected, no big deal

The ad quotes Romney in 2003 saying that he "will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people. And that plant kills people…."

Relevant to this thread, Bill McKibben (author of the article at top) commented "Romney says so many untrue things that it’s deeply ironic and deeply troubling when he gets attacked for one of the few straightforward and accurate charges he ever made."

more news from my alter ego, daryl doomburger:

http://www.climatecentral.org/images/sized/images/uploads/news/8-7-12_andrew_recordsratiographic-500x329.jpeg

Thanks to a record warm January-to-June period and intense, long-lasting heat waves during March, June, and July, the U.S. has passed an ominous milestone: with about five months remaining in the year, there have already been more record daily high temperatures set or tied so far this year than were set or tied during all of 2011. And 2011 had the second-warmest summer on record for the lower 48 states.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/more-record-highs-during-2012-so-far-than-all-of-2011-14768/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48578898/ns/world_news-the_new_york_times/?__utma=14933801.819737031.1342482211.1344388830.1344475796.25&__utmb=14933801.1.10.1344475796&__utmc=14933801&__utmx=-&__utmz=14933801.1342482211.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)&__utmv=14933801.|8=Earned%20By=msnbc%7Ccover=1^12=Landing%20Content=Mixed=1^13=Landing%20Hostname=www.nbcnews.com=1^30=Visit%20Type%20to%20Content=Earned%20to%20Mixed=1&__utmk=188209448#.UCMSp_aPXE0

The 'Dark Knight' shootings are terrifying and ppl will rightly be appalled by them but somehow climate change lacks the immediacy that would rightly make it that much more terrifying

And given that the Dark Knight shootings will lead to zero changes in gun control, what hope does the planet have?

Kim Stanley Robinson said in one of his novels "It's easier to destroy the planet than change capitalism one small bit."

The McKibben article has a real feel of a man realising all his work has been for nothing, and that we're all fucked.

That KSR quote is a lift from someone/something else but I can't remember who or what damnit.

Ah shit it's Zizek.

here's an article about how many managers of zoos aren't sure if talking about the underlying issue that threatens the viability of many of the animals IN the zoo is a good idea. it might be a bummer for people to hear.

In the 1980s and ’90s, Dr. Boyle noted, some zoos and aquariums made a big push to emphasize threats like the depletion of the earth’s ozone layer, the razing of rain forests by loggers and farmers and the overfishing of the Pacific. Electronic boards toted up the numbers of acres being cleared, and enlarged photographs depicted denuded landscapes.

Surveys of visitors showed a backlash. “For lots of reasons, the institutions tended to approach the issues by talking about the huge scale of the problems,” Dr. Boyle said. “They wanted to attract people’s attention, but what we saw happening over time was that everyday people were overwhelmed.” It did not help that a partisan split had opened in the United States over whether global warming was under way, and whether human activity was the leading cause.

At the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, Brian Davis, the vice president for education and training, says to this day his institution ensures its guests will not hear the term global warming. Visitors are “very conservative,” he said. “When they hear certain terms, our guests shut down. We’ve seen it happen.”

Great job Brian Davis, vice president for education and training!

we've found that people don't really like education all that much, so i play a lot of minesweeper and drink my paycheck

the line between zoo and circus is very fine

The presence of clowns is a good indicator.

I listened to an interview with McKibben about a week ago. He's now trying to organize a mass movement prior to the 2014/2016 election cycle, as his last, best hope to turn this shit around short of climatic globacide. What he proposes to do has never been done before. Not even close. But I give him credit for trying.

2013: hottest ever

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2012/09/will_2013_be_the_hottest_year_climate_change_and_el_ni_o_will_make_next_year_sweltering_.html

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/09/rocking-the-ac/

Here's a decent article by Bill Blakemore (veteran ABC journalist) trying to explain why media coverage of climate change is so abysmal: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/09/the-elephant-were-all-inside/

he basically attributes it to two things:

1) "...a cynical disinformation and intimidation campaign — as reported in detail by a handful of professional journalists and academics including Steve Coll, Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway, and Ross Gelbspan (as we’ve reported before on Nature’s Edge) paid for, so the reporting says, by multinational fossil fuel companies, often based in the United States, that are fighting a rear-guard action to prevent inevitable regulation on carbon emissions as long as possible.:

2) the unprecedented scale of the problem. he has some useful insights regarding the newsroom, which is typically divided into local, national and "foreign" stories. climate change is different. it's beyond "foreign", it's everyone. it's global. newsrooms aren't really used to handling this kind of story.

i'm also glad that he's willing to go ahead and say that "Manmade global warming is, according to the world’s climate scientists, solidly on track to be far bigger than history’s biggest atrocity so far."

which really goes back to the scale of it. i don't think people can really comprehend that we're talking tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions of ruined human lives from this thing. it's too much to handle, so we just ignore it.

that's definitely a thing that humans do, which is going to be a big problem in the future, not just (though probably most importantly) in the case of climate change, but for the more and more problems that, in a world of 7, 8, or 10 billion people will just be too big to fathom.

Exxon's CEO, from that ABC article:

"I'm not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It'll have a warming impact. The -- how large it is is what is very hard for anyone to predict. And depending on how large it is, then projects how dire the consequences are.

As we have looked at the most recent studies coming -- and the IPCC reports, which we -- I've seen the drafts; I can't say too much because they're not out yet. But when you predict things like sea level rise, you get numbers all over the map. If you take a -- what I would call a reasonable scientific approach to that, we believe those consequences are manageable. "

yeah, the shift from "it's not happening" to "we need geoengineering" to fix this this is on the wall. hope everyone likes the Terminator version of the future, brought to you by Exxon et al!

i would bet $ that the 'futurama solution' has been considered

...a cynical disinformation and intimidation campaign — as reported in detail by a handful of professional journalists and academics including Steve Coll, Naomi Oreskes[...]

That's not the Steve Coll who writes for the NYer, I take it?

sorry Leee, just saw your question. It is the Steve Coll that writes for the NYer. He put out a book this year called Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, but I haven't read it.

Also, sigh

http://www.realclimate.org/images//nsidc.jpeg

ah like 5 mins into this frontline episode on global warming deniers and i can feel the rage

i guess its on the politics of global warming altogether but its just the deniers so far

ha theyre all 'thank god for al gore'

god these people are such barbarians

You have a stronger stomach than i

co2 is just plant food is kinda hilarious and brilliant

I haven't watched it yet. Focusing attention on deniers is actually useful in the U.S. context, esp. if it draws attention to the fossil fuel-driven disinformation campaign. So many duped people.

that one republican legislator with the dog-eared denier book was interesting because he seems to have been legitimately duped

What surprised me was working on the fuel truck on my second pipeline construction job. It was one of 3 fuel trucks we used on the job servicing all of the equipment. Cat is the main supplier of most pipeline jobs, though john deere also. On that job which was 87 miles of 42" inch pipe we had roughly 20 trackhoes, 15 side booms, 12 dozers of varying sizes, 2 very large front end loaders, 5 fork lifts, 40 water pumps of varies sizes, who knows how many welding machines, 2 graders, 12 compressor trailers for testing, directional drilling equipment, etc... We would start the day at 4 am with a full tank of diesel and by noon we were having to drive back to the fueling station for another tank. Each of the trucks would do this everyday for the whole length of the job. I can imagine it's similar to building and trade work, trucking, farming, power plants, etc. Working in construction, you realize fossil fuels are how things are built, grown, and distributed. Imagining a change in this seems impossible.

running out of the fossil fuels will be quite the change

the link to the episode on frontline's website was a little hard to find, so here it is in case others were looking for it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/climate-of-doubt/

there wasn't really any new information in the episode, but it did a nice job of summarizing the key aspects of the disinformation campaign. for anyone who was fascinated by the part about fred singer's "professional contrarianism" (i.e. his role in getting paid to protest the science about secondhand smoke, the ozone layer, acid rain and now global warming), check out Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway.

cool thx

That was depressing. I was not aware of these global warming skeptics. I've met people with different ideas about the effects of global warming (i.e. can we global warm just enough to delay the next ice age). I've met scientists who believe that "brown cloud" emissions are more important than CO2 emissions, etc. But the correlation between CO2, brown cloud, etc. production and the warming temperature of the Earth is undeniable. The laws of thermodynamics linking the two are not controversial.

ime, conservatives do love any contrarian opinion that's fed to them, though.

So, I know that there's something like 98% consensus among scientists that climate change is real and caused by human activity. Does anyone know what kind of consensus there is on McKibben's doomy numbers?

Sort of wish I was 40 years old and that I could live a moderately comfortable life and die in peace, instead of being 24 and looking at a grim-ass death in the face of dwindling resources and hostile, migrating neighbors killing each other over what little potable water remains.

Memorize all the songs from Annie now, while you still can. They will see you through.

Sort of wish I was 40 years old and that I could live a moderately comfortable life and die in peace, instead of being 24 and looking at a grim-ass death in the face of dwindling resources and hostile, migrating neighbors killing each other over what little potable water remains.

― global tetrahedron, Monday, October 29, 2012 8:30 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this will probably not happen if you live in a rich country that is not a small island. at least not in your lifetime.

According to the defense scenario thinkers Gwynne Dyer spoke with for Climate Wars, the major human effects we'll see in the first half of the century are most likely due to agricultural failures in the subtropical zones, as the Hadley cell atmospheric circulation enlarges. As a result (and this is seen is the majority of the 40 odd computational climate models used in the IPCC reports) the twin belts of desert that circle the globe at about 30° N and S will push incrementally polewards. That means serious drought in Mexico, the US southwest and Western great plains, the southern tier of the European Mediterranean, through Turkey, Ukraine and the Indian subcontinent. I guess the Argentine pampas and Australian grain belt as well. The last decade has already seen droughts in all these places, and the near failure of the Indian monsoon last year was a real nail-biter. There's probably still enough grain production to feed the wealthy countries (though meat will become dear), but its another matter entirely for developing nations that even today have difficulty feeding themselves. There's also an issue with rice, originally a temperate region grass, failing to germinate if daytime temperatures hold above 35° C or nighttime temperatures above 25° C.

So, stop thinking about rising sea levels or storms. Those will happen, but these are smaller issues this century (current estimates have Greenland melting in 1500 to 5000 years) compared to the agricultural impacts, and the flood of climate refugees. People always raid before they starve. The working phrase for UK defense planners considering the mid-21st century is "Lifeboat Britain". I'm sure the U.S. military has similar metaphors. The Chinese (who like the temperate West get off pretty easy) will eye thawing Siberian arable land with interest. Pakistan and India may get a chance to use their new atomic toys as they dispute shrinking Indus tributary water in an era of diminishing Himalayan glacial runoff. The Saudis, Chinese and Koreans have been on an African farmland buying spree. Good luck convincing any African leaders to keep those contracts when the fecal matter impacts the rotary air circulator.

Mentioned hereabouts before, but Dyer's audio documentary for the CBC is just riveting stuff.

In summary, the much derided ABC speculative program Earth 2100 seems to have followed the defense planning scenarios Gwynne Dyer reported on remarkably well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUWyDWEXH8U

I guess by 'grim-ass' death I meant less living/dying in a Mad Max style situation and something more akin to major social decay? I imagine unrest such as the type taking over Greece eventually will eventually make its way to the US. I have no reason to doubt my future won't be like that of a current Greek retiree seeing the loss of their pensions up against austerity measures enacting a dismantling of basic social nets, combined with the unraveling of other social structures we take for granted. Not drowning as my equatorial island is consumed by the ocean, but still grim...

Ryurc

GT, if you're only in your 20s you won't have to wait til retirement to see wholesale abandonment of pensions and entitlements. That all starts later this decade, and early next. The US as economy that also has to invest in the future can't afford to spend 25% of its income on healthcare, primarily to boomer retirees. Ergo, it won't. The fight is just over whether the drone that gets to say no to your medical interventions is on a government or private payroll. (Advice: try not to get sick. Most chronic disease and hence medical costs are due to dietary choices in earlier life. It also helps to be lucky.) Social security will continue to be eroded away but understating inflation adjustments, as has been done to the tune of 1-1.5% a year since 1995's Boskin Commission. Pensions? Only public sector workers have heard about such things for decades, and a lot of municipalities will look at the path of San Bernardino or Harrisberg for a way out from their unfunded pension overhang. They promised what their tax base couldn't afford, and there's only one way out now.

As for Greece, its been a pretty sick political patronage society for decades. Tax cheating is near universal, railway workers were taking in €88,000, retirement was arbitrarily set in the early 50s for a lot of professions (including sedentary ones like hairdresser). There was never enough government revenue to pay for the largess, and you could tax Greek millionaires at 100% and there still wouldn't. Add in a private credit bubble of similar magnitude that won't recur, and you get the economy of the early 90s, plus a lot more empty promises. Sad for those who assumed money would continue to rain down from Northern Europe forever, but the smart Greeks put their savings in Swiss accounts starting decades ago.

The U.S. has issues, but they're nowhere near the gravity of those faced by places like Greece (or southern Italy, or hell, lots of Africa) where the common good hasn't been part of the political discourse for a rather long while. I mostly hope that in time more outsiders will come to understand Greece's plight as a cautionary tale, rather than fuel for their own domestic partisanship.

The thing is, paper currencies come and go, governments come and go, but cultures tend to endure. Create a culture of shared sacrifice for common goals, and pick the goals well (no one will remember America's golden age of sickcare largess in 100 years, but they might remember excellent preschool that changed the course of their life), and solutions become possible. Create a modern Greece (starting under the colonels, if not earlier), and you won't have the social infrastructure to deal with a lot of problems (demographic, monetary, resource, and most importantly this century climatic) at once.

Read "Subtract a private credit bubble" in 2nd para. Pretty unclear hasty typing on my part.

things are def fucked up but american per capita income is 2x that of greece and we control our own currency. you just don't get a lot out of making a comparison like that.

also don't be jealous of 40 y/os, they're fucked too

via ned: Nation Suddenly Realizes This Just Going To Be A Thing That Happens From Now On

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/BBW.jpg
It's Global Warming, Stupid

for over ten years I've been thinking that at some point, climate change would make for a single-issue electorate, and all we'd have to do is wait

but the one thing I never quite anticipated, was that the presidential debates held the month before that very turning point, would have our two candidates trying to outarguing each other on which one was more coal-friendly, and that there might be any confusion as to whom to vote for on the issue

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

and yet, bloomberg just unexpectedly endorsed obama, emphasizing, of all things, obama's ability to lead on climate change.

iatee posted this on one of the political threads, and it's worth reposting here:

“@ezraklein: 1. Bloomberg's endorsement is one of the most fascinating and strategically designed endorsements I've seen.”
“@ezraklein: 2. By endorsing this close to the election, he's trying to impose a real cost on the Republican Party for climate denialism.”
“@ezraklein: 3. By attacking Obama and praising the old Romney in his op-ed, he's buttressing his role as an arbiter of the center.”
“@ezraklein: 4. And then he's spending that credibility to make "acting to stop climate change" a centrist issue.”
“@ezraklein: 5. Bloomberg's not endorsing Obama so much as he's trying to reset the incentives on climate change. It's a huge play.”
“@ezraklein: 6. And by tying the endorsement to Sandy, Bloomberg is trying to cement the idea that Sandy=climate change”
“@ezraklein: 7. Making it at least a bit more likely that the political elites will see Sandy as a proper forcing event for action on climate change.”

― iatee, Thursday, November 1, 2012 6:46 PM

and yeah, gotta agree, fuck obama on climate change, and triple fuck romney (and pretty much every republican), but i'm really glad bloomberg did what he did.

i really was affected by this article, but on re-reading, some of it is a bit hard to pin down.

eg

the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

where did he get this from?

counting the stars

what are the stars

the number comes from multiplying 0.5 by itself 327 times. 0 .5 to the 327th power is 3.6575597e-99, or rounded, 3.7e-99

by "simple chance", the probability of a number exceeding the average is 0.5 (1 in 2). Think rolling a six-sided die. The average roll is 3.5. half of the time (0.5) you'll roll above average (4, 5 or 6). The probability of exceeding the average roll twice in a row is 0.5 x 0.5, or 0.25. In other words if you roll a die twice, you have a 25% chance of rolling above average twice in a row. The probability of exceeding the average three times in a row is 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 (12.5%) And so on.

i still wish he wouldn't led off the article with that, though, because it's confusing and not too illuminating. it's like saying the odds of someone growing up to be over seven feet tall are 1 in 333,000, a number considerably larger than the number of residents in Dayton, Ohio.

but essentially, to cut through all the bullshit, what he's saying is "the odds of the monthly temperature of the planet exceeding the average of the 20th century for 327 months in a row are INCREDIBLY, MINDBOGGLINGLY LOW. it's not pure chance which is impacting temperatures - something else is in play. And climate scientists have conclusively shown that, more than any other factor, it's humans that are impacting temperatures by our use of fossil fuels.

He probably just gets bored giving the same warnings over and over and over again and comes up with random little stats like that because he's already used "INCREDIBLY, MINDBOGGLINGLY LOW" in a bunch of articles and speeches.

yeah fair enough. when he says about the reserves of fuel, and says something like "that's the end of it" or whatever, is he talking about literally the entire planet being destroyed? is there a total extinction scenario here, or what?

he writes, "You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can't have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That's how the story ends."

and before that he says: "Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. ("Reasonable," in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.)"

no one is talking about the planet being destroyed, literally. the planet will be here for billions of years after humans are raptured into the loving glorious arms of jesus christ our savior. and few people are suggesting that global warming will cause humans to go "extinct". however, the implication for exceeding the "safe" amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (and there's a not small chance that it's already too late) is a transition, during our lifetimes, to a pretty miserable existence - scorching summers, more extreme weather both in terms of quantity and intensity, droughts, water scarcity, rising infectious diseases, millions of climate refugees, etc etc

of course, if you're rich you can survive pretty nicely for a while by gating yourself off from the rest of the world and hiring people to make the annoying people who want food and shelter to go away. the same thing will be going on, on a larger scale, with nation-states

somehow i doubt that a country full of people like this is going to react in a non-despicable fashion when the shit hits the fan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43lcd11QUqo

that clip is the tragedy of late-period U.S. in a nutshell, imo

sorry, Bloomberg is just engaging in vomitorious megalomania.

super-sized sodas' terrifying new math

That clip literally makes me sick to my stomach. I really hate this country some days.

Vomitorious megalomania or no vomitorious megalomania, in politics you take your allies where you can find them.

& Bloom was Bam's ally when he ejected OWS, don't forget

or perhaps sockpuppet

the planet will be here for billions of years after humans

It was interesting (to me, at any rate) to learn that due to the increasing luminosity of the sun as it processes through the main sequence, multi-cellular life only has about 800 million years left, and eukaryotic life about 1.2 billion. Terrestrial planets around G2 stars only offer about a 2 billion year window for complex lifeforms, which goes some way to explaining the Fermi paradox. The thought most civilizations can't handle the temptation of fossil energy may account for paradox entirely.

That clip literally makes me sick to my stomach. I really hate this country some days

yeah--the sort of people whose reponse to a question about the planet being irremediably fucked is to triumphantly shout 'USA! USA! USA!'... this is why we non-US people look at (some of) you guys with alarm and terror

hey as long as you realize that isn't the response that all of us take

If the planet is irredeemably fucked I'm going to stock up on Ativan

ditto with aging and death tho probably

hey as long as you realize that isn't the response that all of us take

Absolutely--it's just that they're the ones we tend to see on the telly/internet/in power

My mother-in-law is a born-again Christian and a teatard, and when I posted something on FB this morning mentioning climate change, this was her brilliant response:

Tell the folks waiting in line for gas for 6 to 8 hours in New York about climate change... and how do you plan to stop hurricanes? the climate has been changing since the earth was born... duh..

In the face of that, we're doomed.

would the baseball players on steroids analogy work on her? Climate change doesn't "cause" any single hurricane, but it makes them more frequent and more powerful, just like steroids don't cause any single home run, they just make them more frequent and more powerful?

yeah we're doomed

duh

yeah you can't argue with that can you. . . we're fucked

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/11/hurricane-sandy-the-aftermath/100397/

if you don't have anything that needs gasoline you don't have to wait in a gas line, duh

to get back to the point though,phil D...how do YOU plan to stop hurricanes?

death ray iirc

I believe George Carlin cut to the chase: "The planet will be fine -- SAVE US"

yeah, i sympathize with that, and i think that people are more likely to respond to warnings about the future of humanity rather than making it about polar bears.

still, it should be worth noting that it's projected that with a 4 degrees celsius rise in temperature by 2100, more than 50% of the earth's species would go extinct.

we're currently on track for a 6 degrees celsius rise in temperature by 2100, according to the International Energy Agency .

6 degrees celsius rise in temperature by 2100

oh shit! oh dear! (for the celsius-challenged, that's ~11 degrees fahrenheit)

that is pretty fucking bad

we're so fucked

all this shit reminds me of my great-uncle, who didn't believe in saving for retirement, because the rapture would have happened by then

last I checked, he's in his mid 80s, still doing some sort of work, and has some deadbeat kids

PLAN NOW BECAUSE YOU MIGHT NOT MERCIFULLY DIE BEFORE THINGS GO TO SHIT

...isn't that exactly what the antichrist would say in this situation?

more proof of the forthcoming rapture

more than 50% of the earth's species would go extinct

yes but how many of those are just beetles

already 50% extinct iirc

god must be pissed cause that's like 150k species right there?

Would the parable of the flood (not THE Flood), and the poxy fule sending away would-be rescuers because God would provide, be of any use for the pious?

tbh i don't think there are actually that many people who actually don't worry about global warming because of their belief that a rapture will save the day. unfortunately my dad is one of those people, but it's not too common from what i can tell. and there are some good books that lay out lots of christian arguments for doing something on climate change, citing the role of humanity as steward's of God's creation, etc. i wish my dad was that kind of christian. but i think it's easy to expend too much energy on the subset of rapture/global warming people because at least they have some sort of tangible, coherent reason for why they're not paying attention to hordes of scientists warning that we're about to be in deep shit. it may not be a reason that makes any sense to me, but at least it's something besides apathy and shrugging shoulders, and so it's easy to focus on it because at least there's something to attack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugRhP2QS94s

So in short, Obama is stupid and unserious because he promised to stop the rise in the oceans that isn't happening because Al Gore is fat. But Obama is also weak and incapable because he didn't stop the rise in the oceans that isn't happening--but actually is happening because New York is drowning. Mayor Bloomberg can point to Obama's lack of success in this area, of course, since he endorsed him.

christ, this is depressing on so many levels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAuRrmSUQ08

I am dealing with global warming by never having kids and by drinking a lot so I will die early of cirrhosis of the liver

A man, a plan, a fatal disease.

not directly related to global warming (it's about nuclear winter) but i think re catastrophic environmental shift + survival of humanity it's relevant:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/11/nuclear-winter-and-human-extinction-qa-with-luke-oman.html

LOL comments box, the first guy says

Interesting article, though the fact that Luke Oman gave a 1 in 10,000 probability on a question where model uncertainty is so obviously a problem does not exactly inspire confidence in him.

and then goes on to say "here are 10 things that aren't in your model" and then just ballparks 1 in 100 out of nowhere, based on things like, uh, doomsday bombs, human extinction cults, mountains of decaying bodies, and how modern humans are non-viable

Anybody gonna check out the 350.org Do The Math Tour? I'm going to the presentation in SF on Saturday. Looks like they just got the Mayor of Seattle to agree to divest the city from fossil fuels.

I am dealing with global warming by never having kids and by drinking a lot so I will die early of cirrhosis of the liver

Misread this as "clitoris of the liver." Now I know why everything feels completely amazing when I'm drinking.

bonnie tyler's total clitoris of the liver

misread that as "tyler perry's total clitoris of the river"

Warmer still: Extreme climate predictions appear most accurate, report says

Climate scientists agree the Earth will be hotter by the end of the century, but their simulations don’t agree on how much. Now a study suggests the gloomier predictions may be closer to the mark.

“Warming is likely to be on the high side of the projections,” said John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., a co-author of the report, which was based on satellite measurements of the atmosphere.

That means the world could be in for a devastating increase of about eight degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, resulting in drastically higher seas, disappearing coastlines and more severe droughts, floods and other destructive weather.

Such an increase would substantially overshoot what the world’s leaders have identified as the threshold for triggering catastrophic consequences. In 2009, heads of state agreed to try to limit warming to 3.6 degrees, and many countries want a tighter limit.

so at the risk of being a dick i'm gonna say this is all a done deal. unless some crazy technological breakthrough comes about, shit is fucked.

there is absolutely no way the usa or china or whomever voluntarily caps their shit minus cold fusion. that is the terrifying math.

i think i have to believe that humanity can pull this out thru development of alternative energy, or worst case scenario, man-made solutions to warming or i'd just be hopelessly depressed. obviously to be optimistic about this is to deny all the reasons to be pessimistic about humanity and its self-destruction, but to dwell on the likely scenario is really just debilitating and maybe even nihilistic.

Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

Marx thought that technology would ultimately undo Capitalism as it became cheaper to feed everyone for free than to charge them for the food. One hopes for a similar technological deus ex machina here. It's maybe appropriate that we rely upon technology to save us from our impending doom, as it's technology that brought us this mess, and arguably our relationship w/ teche that which defines our humanness. Can we save us from ourselves? I maintain optimistic that even if the worst forecasts come to pass, humanity in some form will survive. After all, we've survived catastrophic climate change in the past, but what a shame it would be to head back into the wilderness after everything we've done so far.

optimism*

like even if we were successful, somehow, in calling on government and industry to transition away from a bunch of shit that makes them money, there's still a certain level of long term climate change that's just inevitable due previous emissions. soooo...stockpile your spf50 i guess.

i gotta unbookmark this thread. it really never fails to bum me out.

oh humanity in some form will survive, i'm sure. it's only a few degrees and humans are pretty adaptable.

but not in the current layout at the current population. at some point, much like the ussr collapsing, what seemed inexorable will be laughable.

I'm w George Carlin/Morbz here. Climate change may be real but environmentalists need to change the conversation away from disappearing glaciers and predictions of sea water levels in 100 years and back towards the quality of air in your city and how many of your family members die from toxin-loving cancers.

it'll be terrible for the generation that lives through the shift, but due to the hedonic treadmill future generations will probably be as happy as we are today

and, you know, particulates in the atmosphere or whatever might work. i hope something does. but there is no will anywhere to reduce carbon emissions.

only newt gingrich had the vision to take us to HD 40307g.

Strange side-effect of the increase in ocean acidification: Ocean Acidification Research Suggests Return To Dinosaur-Era Underwater Acoustics

BTW, if this thread is knocking you down do not search on "ocean acidification." It gives me migraines. Off-the-record most oceano-climate guys agree that warming is already past the event horizon/"I did it 35 minutes ago" line, but that there is a fighting chance to turn the pH level around before it all goes to hell.

I'm guardedly optimistic. Sure, there will be no domestic political will in the U.S. until a major city dies (Cat 5 swamping Miami, Phoenix/Las Vegas running out of water). But the broad outlines of an initial climate deal are well understood: big cuts from developed nations over a couple decades, capping developing nations at current rates, a couple hundred billion a year sent their way to fund wind/solar/nuclear. I wouldn't be surprised at an overall peak around 550 ppm, with serious tipping point sequellae (like Siberian permafrost methane releases) averted only through some serious geoengineering. Loading 10 air force tankers with sulfur dioxide for 3 sorties a day is pretty damn cheap compared to letting the planet go off the rails for the full PETM scenario. Perhaps 50 ppm can be removed through Amazon reforestation and another 50 ppm via industrial scale biochar production. The rest we may just have to cope with for a few thousands of years.

I'm also very hopeful that the initial Moore's Law effect observed in solar energy will turn out to be predictive and we'll see a boom in solar energy akin to the recent computing boom. Not to mention that installing solar panels on every building in the United States would be enough work to keep America employed for years.

waiting for interstellar space-migration once we abandon mother earth, ready to be put into a deep slumber and checked in on occasionally by a robot helper

Yes but solar panel are SO AESTHETICALLY UNAPPEALING.

A New Yorker article from earlier this year on the guy developing an artificial leaf (absorb CO2, output electricity) has a terrifying explanation about how if we raised the standard of living for people in developing countries, they'd get set onto an inevitable course towards greater resource consumption, which of course leads to greater and greater energy demands == doom. That's why short of some radical geoengineering, I don't think that technology can really help, and also why capitalism is untenable (as we rocket towards 9 billion people).

I am dealing with global warming by never having kids and by drinking a lot so I will die early of cirrhosis of the liver

― 乒乓, Sunday, November 4, 2012 2:29 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

+ consume less resources

I think my continued gut reaction to climate change is: this is not the world I grew up in, this is not what they taught us in school

but I'm sure people felt the same way during similar (pardon the pun) sea-changes in our history

brave new world, people

if we raised the standard of living for people in developing countries, they'd get set onto an inevitable course towards greater resource consumption, which of course leads to greater and greater energy demands == doom

They are on an inevitable course already. If 'we' don't get into that market then China or India or somebody else will. Artificial leaf guy should be thrilled at the thought of beating old energy technology to the punch imo.

I think the doom calculations take into account advances like the artificial leaf? Because the story that they tell is that it can only provide so much energy for a certain standard of living; once societies surpass that point, fossil fuels become much more seductive.

NYer article here (paywalled, unfortunately).

i gotta unbookmark this thread. it really never fails to bum me out.

― Mordy, Friday, November 9, 2012 11:54 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

may have related this story elsewhere on ILX, but I have a friend who went and joined a cult after getting high one night and watching a documentary about peak oil

xp And of course I'm aware of the ethical hypocrisy of being a citizen of a developed country where I already enjoy the standard of living that's driving us off the cliff and suggesting that people living in poverty are the potential problem -- I'm just making an argument for utter DESPAIR.

Seems likely to me that human organizational and technological ability will prolong our global population collapse over the course of a century or more. This will, of course, prolong the period of environmental damage also. When the dust settles, there will still be hundreds of millions of humans, but our present cultures won't survive without major retooling.

Is contraction and convergence still something that people are pushing for? i know it's hugely idealistic, but at the same time it has always struck me as being by far the most equitable way forward.

No doubt some people are pushing for it, but not nearly enough to make it happen. Humanity's alliegance to social equality is superficial compared to their deep, fierce and abiding alliegance to themselves, their family and their tribe.

I do agree with that, but on the other hand our western societies still lurch torwards racial and sexual equality - at least the legislation for it is mostly in place even where our behaviour may lag behind - so maybe we shouldn't be too pessimistic on that front?

Racial and sexual equality don't really require any sacrifices on the part of the power structure, though. Giving up the SUV, on the other hand...

I was discussing global warming with my very religious but liberal father this weekend. He believes that God is sending storms as wake up calls to people to get them to take global warming seriously. He doesn't believe God will allow us to destroy the world, but will modify our behavior through negative consequences. Putting God aside for a second, I think he has a point that as hurricanes and droughts continue to increase, people will become more receptive to changing their behavior and reducing emissions. I only hope that a critical mass gets the message before it's too late to make a meaningful impact.

but the problem is that, the changing of people's behavior is not gonna be a 1:1 reduction in the 'amount' of global warming we see

I mean, we might as well be unpopping bottles on the deck of the titanic right now, ya mean?

also terrifying: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/agriculture/9661559/Coffee-threatened-by-climate-change.html

; (

We should start an Apocalypse: How Are You Preparing for Catastrophic Climate Change? thread. Share tips w/ fellow ilxors. Compare elevation maps.

figure out where gun ownership is concentrated the most and stay away from those areas

I was discussing global warming with my very religious but liberal father this weekend. He believes that God is sending storms as wake up calls to people to get them to take global warming seriously. He doesn't believe God will allow us to destroy the world, but will modify our behavior through negative consequences.

― Mordy, Saturday, November 10, 2012 10:56 PM (17 minutes ago)

god as a behavioral economist avant la lettre

there are those solar tower things that use a field of mirrors to concentrate sunlight and superheat water to drive turbines

sort of a rudimentary technology but iirc a giant field of 10,000 square miles of them in the sahara desert could provide all europe's energy needs

More 'climate change'-related utter drivel.

As others have stated, NO warming for the past 16 long years, despite increased atmospheric CO2. It's hilarious; evidence is straight in front of our eyes and some still will not see it. CO2 theory trashed and falsified, yet it's the 'emperors new clothes' for many who have invested their cash and reputations into 'climate change'.

The second-greatest scam of all-time.

what is #1?

scalectrix

oh humanity in some form will survive, i'm sure. it's only a few degrees and humans are pretty adaptable.

well, no... once we reach at certain temperature, environmental feedback loops kick in that cause more rapid warming.

imagine a habitable earth for humans as a ball on a small flat area atop a mountain. push it a few inches and it'll stay on top. push it a couple inches more, and it'll roll downhill with increasing speed regardless of whether you have stopped pushing on it or not. that's where we are now with global warming. somewhere between 2 and 6 degrees of warming will take us over the edge, and we don't even know where exactly. and whatever flat area the ball next comes to rest in may not support human life; it certainly will not be anything like where we're at now.

http://grist.org/climate-change/2011-12-05-the-brutal-logic-of-climate-change/

Oceans' rising acidity a threat to shellfish — and humans

Slide after slide, the results were the same. The entire batch of 100 million larvae at the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery had perished.

It took several years for the Oregon oyster breeder and a team of scientists to find the culprit: a radical change in ocean acidity.

The acid levels rose so high that the larvae could not form their protective shells, according to a study published this year. The free-swimming baby oysters would struggle for days, then fall exhausted to the floor of the tank.

"There's no debating it," said Barton, who manages Whiskey Creek, which supplies three-quarters of the oyster seed to independent shellfish farms from Washington to California. "We're changing the chemistry of the oceans."

Rising acidity doesn't just imperil the West Coast's $110-million oyster industry. It ultimately will threaten other marine animals, the seafood industry and even the health of humans who eat affected shellfish, scientists say.

The world's oceans have become 30% more acidic since the Industrial Revolution began more than two centuries ago. In that time, the seas have absorbed 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide that has built up in the atmosphere, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels.

And don't forget the possibility of methan clathrate explosions leading to even faster runaway climate change (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis)

methanE

Compare elevation maps.
If your serious about this, the best spot in N. America is pretty clearly the Pacific northwest west of the Cascades. Western Oregon, Washington, and BC all still get as much or more rainfall in the models, are close enough to oceans to avoid Saharan heat summers, are on the wrong side of the continent for hurricanes, and have abundant wind and wave power potential. While the flora may change a bit due to the absence of freezes (think Mountain Pine Beetle wiping out old-growth forests in BC), it at least won't look like the Mojave.

and don't think our perimeter's unprotected

xp:
Also re feedbacks I'm inordinately fond of this flowchart from the first internet site devoted to methane clathrate catastrophes.

http://www.killerinourmidst.com/grafix/MC%20diagram%203.jpg
Can you find where we are on this map, Timmy?

what is euxinic?

Every time I see that, I wonder what the question marks mean between Methane Catastrophe and Stratospheric ozone destruction, and Decreased tropospheric cloud cover and Stratospheric ozone destruction.

Euxinic simply means that due to low disolved oxygen, there's free hydrogen sulfide in the water column. The oceans stratify locally or globally due to high temperature gradients, so there's no replenishment of bottom oxygen, and free hydrogen sulfide appears right up to the photic zone. This occurs presently in the Black Sea and off Namibia, and produces blooms of purple sulfur bacteria and green sulfur bacteria about 100 ft down. The green sulfur bacterias are the only organisms that produces isorenieratene, and this diagnostic biomarker has been found geologic anoxic events and mass extinctions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lYN_lXU9PA

feeling bad that I keep looking at this thread like "damn, this is a fucked-up science fiction novel you're all discussing", because there is no way I can fit the actual realness of it into my head

like it actually dawned on me as (probably) real, really for real real, for about one morning and that was too much for my brain and I had to mentally recategorise it and put my head back in the sand - but I'm still here reading it in this detached way which scares me if I think about it, so I don't

Any of you who haven't yet should at the very least consider writing what politicians you can and demanding them to take action. Also, write whatever university you go to/went to/work at about divesting from fossil fuels. I know it's easy to be discouraged by what we're up against but hell, we've gotta try something.

Sure, why not. Who do you think would be the best politicians to contact? I'll send a message to my National + State House rep + Senators. Anyone else?

Pretty sure that's why Gore went with sea level rise as the main danger in Inconvenient Truth - its can be readily visualized, and sounds a lot less like science fiction than some of the actual "worst case scenarios" that the climatologists and paleoclimatologists look at. Thing is the big ice sheets have a lot of thermal inertia. Current models have Greenland melting over 3,000-20,000 years in a 6° C Arctic warming, and 1,000-5,000 years in an 8° C warmer Arctic. That's a lot of time to build dikes and levees.

The tipping points like the permafrost methane and methane clathrates causing a runaway greenhouse (like that of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) are barely mentioned by name in the mass media - the public generally just hears about vague "tipping points". If you read enough about these events (which occur with some regularity in the geological record), you're in for a lot of sleepless nights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1liqk9UQNAQ

BO. Also, the 1 year hold he put on the keystone pipeline last year thanks to Mckibben and friends' civil disobedience is about to end, so let him know that we can't afford that much more fossil fuel getting burned.

Sent. If anyone wants to see my copy of the letter for inspiration for their own (or just reuse) I'm happy to share it.

"and, you know, particulates in the atmosphere or whatever might work. i hope something does. but there is no will anywhere to reduce carbon emissions."

i brought this up on the politics thread in passing but is there any chance for some massive new deal type thing where you create jobs making windmills and installing solar panels on federal land/buildings? since everyone is screaming about jobs people would have more jobs and it would make the climate thing more real if the govt actually took some big bold step like that. guess it would never happen. seems like a no-brainer though. create jobs, create better energy sources, etc. i mean even if you powered ONLY government buildings/facilities with wind/solar you could create tons of jobs for years.

it wasn't framed as such, but the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, aka the "Stimulus", aka the harbinger for the apocalypse) was in large part a clean energy bill. there's a good article on that i posted a while back, can't remember where, but here it is again: http://grist.org/green-jobs/2011-02-16-the-most-important-energy-bill-in-american-history/

scott, I think a huge jobs program to implement alternative energy throughout the country would be lead to an economic boom, be a model for the world, and maybe save humanity. such an amazing idea.

xpost

but you're right, green jobs are a huge opportunity. whenever obama brings it up and can just sound like the usual political bullshit since he usually crams it inbetween sentences talking about how great clean coal is, how much he loves fracking, and how the thought of expanding domestic drilling even more than he already has makes him shoot jets of spooge to heights and distances that approach his personal records. but it really is going to be one of the most important source of jobs in the 21st century.

BO's administration still leased 272 million tons of coal mining rights from Federal lands on average from 2008-2011. About 10 times the annual carbon content shipped by the proposed Keystone XL (25.3 million tons/year).

A barrel of Athabasca coal sands oil is basically a barrel + 2-3 mmbtu of natural gas in terms of emissions (Ie, roughly 1.25-1.38 "ordinary" crude bbl emission equivalents). There's frontier (deep sea, etc) conventional oil that emits that much when one includes the emissions involved in discovery and development, so the idea that Alberta oil sands is particularly dirty always seemed a bit wooly.

Anyway, if anyone wants a sample letter, this one focuses on green jobs: http://tinyurl.com/be49asy

a few years ago there was something called the Apollo Alliance (since renamed the BlueGreen Alliance), that pushed for clean energy jobs on a massive scale. The Apollo reference, of course, being to the Apollo program, as a reminder that it's possible to do amazing things in a short amount of time if you invest enough energy and money.

Basic unsolved problem with new 'green job' economy: too many humans on the planet.

why is that a problem for green job economy?

xp:
Thing about ARRA is that the need for getting funds into the economy was such that most of it was tax relief and grants to states to keep Medicaid and state budgets afloat. Energy investment, all of it, amounted 38 billion of the $840 billion tab. Less than 5%, a lot of that being for Defense dept site cleanup, grid reliability, and water superfund. Guestimate that 2-3% of the ARRA was green energy. It certainly helps, but in context its about the same as one carrier battle group.

The green job economy attempts to preserve the high-consumption levels of western societies. Unless something reverses the population growth patterns of the past century, this path still leads to environmental catastrophe, afaics.

Hopefully there is some natural stasis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox

the problem isn't with continued, unending population growth - the UN projections have some shaky assumptions, but it's still likely that world population will top out at 9 - 12 billion by mid-to-late century. the problem is that the amount of people on earth right NOW is already way more than the earth can sustainably handle. we're already using 1.5 earths per year.

Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year.

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/Number_of_Planet_Scenarios_2008.JPG
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/

but certainly that usage will go down w/ broad implementation of alternative energy, no?

7 billion now. The most comprehensive survey of sustainable population estimates I've seen is Joel E. Cohen's How Many People Can the Earth Support? which offered a lot of estimates, most clustering between 1.5 and 2.5 billion. By those we are at 2.8-4.6 earths already.

In the long run, it may come down to something trivial, like just how much phosphorus is available for agriculture once mineral deposits run out.

xpIt may not go down as fast as the extra population and higher wealth of China/India makes it go up.

xpost

like sanpaku just mentioned, the earth footprint goes beyond things like fossil fuel consumption. it's also about things as basic as access to potable water, and topsoil. everybody could be speeding around a Jetsons landscape in flying solar cars, but it doesn't mean shit if you can't grow food.

How close are we to being able to mount some rockets on a comet full of water ice and push it into earth orbit for mining?

Much easier to desalinate seawater, tbh.

just feel like a huge government leap/push/war on warming/etc is the only thing that can possibly help. but right now (or 40 years ago). and, you never know, if a republican gets in as prez four years from now it might be the only chance for a while. the president can sign, like, state of emergency legislation, right? make it a matter of life and death/national security or whatever.

we're already using 1.5 earths per year.

what does this even mean?

7 billion now. The most comprehensive survey of sustainable population estimates I've seen is Joel E. Cohen's How Many People Can the Earth Support? which offered a lot of estimates, most clustering between 1.5 and 2.5 billion. By those we are at 2.8-4.6 earths already.

― in the Land of the Yik Yak (Sanpaku), Sunday, November 11, 2012 3:40 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i find it really hard to believe these estimates

realize that is from a reputable source but... i don't buy it

the sustainable rate of resource consumption is the amount that the earth can regenerate every year. just to take one tiny bit of the puzzle, think of forests. every year humans destroy a certain amount of forest. if we're exploiting forests sustainably (i.e., 1.0 earths per year), then we're destroying exactly as much forest as will grow back in a year's time. if you destroy more forest than that, than you are cutting into the "stock" of earth's resources.

another example. you have $100 a year, and it's in a kickass bank account that gives you 5% interest. the sustainable amount you can spend each year is $5, because you started with $100 at the beginning of the year, the interest added $5, giving you a total of $105, and then you spend that extra $5 and you're back at $100. if you spend more than $5, you're cutting into the principle.

another example let's say you have a bathtub full of water. let's say 5 gallons of water is coming out of the faucet per minute. and every minute, 5 gallons is draining out of the bathtub. the bathtub is in equilibrium, because the amount coming into the bathtub through the faucet is exactly as much as the amount of water leaving the bathtub through the drain. if the drain somehow got wider and 10 gallons were leaving the bathtub every minute, than the water level would start dropping.

these examples are all around us. if you consume at higher than a sustainable rate, you cut into the stock of resources (like soil fertility) that humans depend on to survive.

now if you'll excuse me, i have to go get into my full bathtub that has a faucet that flows at 5 gal/min and an open drain.

anyway, all of this talk of equilibrium and renewable resources and stocks is a little misleading when it comes to climate change, unfortunately. the popular perception, i think, is that if we could manage to find a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we'll be safe. but that ignores three key things: 1) lags in the system. the climate change that we're already experiencing isn't caused by our emissions today, it's the result of greenhouse gas emissions from 30+ years ago. Similarly, the greenhouse gases that we emit today won't fully impact the system until 2040 and beyond. 2) once greenhouse gases are added to the atmosphere, they stay there for a loooooong time. thousands of years. it's not like we're trying to finally reach a peak of climate change/warming that we will then quickly draw down from over the course of a century. we're establishing a new baseline of greenhouse gas concentration/warming. 3) the tipping points that have been cited here and elsewhere, the albedo effect, METHANE CATASTROPHE, etc

we're already using 1.5 earths per year.

what does this even mean?

sorry, i have a bad habit of going off on a long explanation that never manages to address the question.

using "1.5 earths per year" means we're using 50% more than the sustainable rate of consumption of the planet's resources every year. for example, again with the forests, if there are 100 trees in a forest, and it's capable of regrowing 10 new trees every year, and you cut down 15 trees in a year, you just used 50% more than the sustainable rate. that doesn't mean the forest is totally useless the following year and that everyone dies. it means that now that forest is starting with 95 trees rather than the 100 it used to have, and that if you keep using it unsustainably, the stock will continue to decline every year until it's depleted.

How close are we to being able to mount some rockets on a comet full of water ice and push it into earth orbit for mining?

― WilliamC, Sunday, 11 November 2012

there's actually water on the moon, it turns out, from comets colliding with it. also for a mere half a trillion we could put a strip of solar panels around the moon and beam the energy, enough for all earth iirc, back as microwaves.

Its probably also a composite of a lot of resource consumption ratios. Obv there are hillsides that have been terraced for rice cultivation that have remained fertile (thanks to nightsoil) for thousands years. Then again we exhausted the southern Ogallala aquifer in 70 or so years and Orange Roughy fisheries in 30. That 1.5 Earths is probably combination of a lot of factoids that says little other than we're exploiting even Earth's renewable resources a good deal faster than they are replenished.

Yeah, catching solar from outside our atmosphere and microwave-relaying it down is something I've thought about a lot, and mentioned a couple of times on ilx. It seems to me that clean energy isn't the problem -- undoing the overheating, unstressing the oceans and feeding too many people are the problems. xpost

I hate to interrupt the parade of catastrophe, but this Wednesday, California's going to start auctioning off some CO2 emissions credits.

it even disturbs me now when i see stories on human longevity. billions of people + everyone wants to live forever. of course this is only applicable in fancy first/western world populations where people can afford high tech treatments and medicines, but still...

but then they say that higher temperatures will bring higher rates of insect/rodent-borne diseases, so maybe things will even out.

i just try to go about my day mostly. but its hard sometimes. i find myself wondering about the futility of new things. or the madness of spending money on things that are wasteful. little things even. let alone future 200 billion dollar star wars movies.

but then they say that higher temperatures will bring higher rates of insect/rodent-borne diseases, so maybe things will even out.

That's it. And the more people you have living in any given area, the more people die when something bad happens there (fire, tsunami, nuclear accident, bomb, quake, plague, famine, etc)--see Bangladesh, which has a massive population density and is regularly hit with horrible diasters.

thanks for the explanation z s

i haven't looked too seriously into this stuff & what i have read tends to have been from more optimistic sources like bjorn lomborg or stuart brand, both of whom might i should probably be more suspicious of. still, something too malthusian about all this that rubs me the wrong way

there's actually water on the moon, it turns out, from comets colliding with it. also for a mere half a trillion we could put a strip of solar panels around the moon and beam the energy, enough for all earth iirc, back as microwaves.

― zvookster, Sunday, November 11, 2012 6:18 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uh, sorry, nope. official chinatown of ilx statement about the water on the moon

xpost,

oh man, please, if you remember nothing else, BE EXTREMELY WARY OF BJORN LOMBORG

what about george monbiot?

i don't read him too often, so i dunno.

not someone i follow too closely but monbiot is generally good on climate change i think. he rides hard against denialists/right-wingers/industry in general/government fannydangle/corporate meddling and spends a lot of his time trying to beat the same usual suspects over the head with the science which can get a bit shrill at times, although it is frequently quite funny too. think that a lot of environmentalists went a bit sour on him when he started boosting the nuclear option as our only real chance of de-carbonising on any great scale (all the same, he doesn't seem to be someone who has much faith in nuclear energy suppliers themselves). way too much of a lefty to ever have much of an influence on government opinion. doesn't have a lot of truck with people singling out rising global population, his arguments always come back to the fact that we in the west are living way beyond our environmental means

bill gates is fairly big on (and is heavily pushing) nuclear as well as a logical but frankly unimaginative energy solution. i think he means well but i can't help but think his charity ought to be broken up even more than microsoft.

i dont hate nuclear but i would not put $ on it post-fukushima

didn't they just invent some kind of new reactor that dramatically reduces the half life of nuclear waste

there's always some fantastic new technology that either just happened or is purported to be right around the corner w/ nuclear that would make it safer or a billion times more efficient, problem is the existing plants periodically breaking down in near-apocalyptic ways obliterates any goodwill ito public opinon

didn't they just invesnt some kind of new reactor that's a billion times better than the one they just invented

Won't fiber optic computing be a thing in a few years? I imagine that will cut down drastically on resources used.

If you were looking at a spreadsheet of cost/benefits, I'm going to assume that nuclear is the brightest option on the page because these are all very smart people who have come to that conclusion.
Still, if you have a few billion, why not make a game-changing stab at solar? (which is currently pretty dirty, apparently)

If you were looking at a spreadsheet of cost/benefits, I'm going to assume that nuclear is the brightest option on the page because these are all very smart people who have come to that conclusion.

somewhat surprisingly, the main problem with nuclear (putting aside all the issues with disasters and disposing of the waste, which are huge problems but generally not anything that have dissuaded financiers in the past) is that it's NOT cost-effective to build new nuclear plants. it's one of the most expensive forms of energy, when you consider the startup costs. it only was possible in the past because of huge subsidies. there hasn't been a new nuclear plant built in the U.S. since the 1970s. yes, part of the reason is because of three mile island and chernobyl, but the main reason is that electricity from coal and natural gas is just less expensive to generate. and even clean energy like wind and solar, which once was more expensive than nuclear, is now the less expensive option, and continues to drop in price as technologies develop. nuclear, on the other hand, is just really fucking expensive and will continue to be for the foreseeable future (those Generation IV nuclear reactors that address, in part, waste management problems? yeah, they're really fucking expensive too).

sorry to link to grist yet again, but they do good work: http://grist.org/nuclear/2011-06-04-nuclear-power-is-expensive-and-uninsurable/

there hasn't been a new nuclear plant built in the U.S. since the 1970s.

? Perry Nuclear Power Plant, which I grew up down the street from, came online in 1987.

it only was possible in the past because of huge subsidies.

I think it's kind of inevitable that whatever the least fatal solution to the energy question is, is not going to be short of huge subsidies.

xpost

d'oh, I think the soundbyte I was looking for was "since the 1980s". But looking at this, two nuclear licenses were granted in the 1990s. None since 1996, though.

well given the huge startup costs it's all the more disheartening to see Gates et al tackling that hurdle in favor of nuclear instead of for hydro/solar because it's too boutique for him.

that said, apparently a solar cel currently uses more resources in its creation than it puts back over its lifetime. I can't really find a good source of updated info to see if this equation has changed or is likely to with new tech.

I saw this reported in the LA Times once but it was followed by a retraction a few days later. I doubt this is true. (But have no definitive links either.)

as i understand it, solar requires a huge outlay of costs upfront, but definitely returns value + over lifetime.

this is a really creative business solution for this problem:
http://www.economist.com/node/21548482?zid=313&ah=fe2aac0b11adef572d67aed9273b6e55

wait, that's not even the one i remembered reading about. this is the one:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/solving-solars-biggest-problem-didnt-take-technology-development/263756/

The other thing about nuclear is that our current climate change problems stem from the unintended and, for a long time, unexpected consequences of our fossil fuel use.

Nuclear fuel use already has two massive environmental problems assoviated with it that we DO know about (accidents, and the fact that nobody knows what to do with such long-lasting and toxic waste), so it seems a poor alternative for that reason alone.

pparently a solar cel currently uses more resources in its creation than it puts back over its lifetime

lol @ this ridiculous calculation

i think that calculation is way antiquated at this point

solar is kinda intuitive to me as a source of energy bc it's the fucking sun. that shit is huge.

it's the main reason why we have global warming iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jpVtYQIols

by "using more resources" I mean the entire cost of production -- energy, raw materials, extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, and cleanup/disposal of the toxic byproducts. In the same way consumers don't pay for the hidden costs for fossil fuels, buyers of solar currently don't pay similar costs, especially if these are cels produced in china where environmental standards are likely not as strict.

yeah sorry there's just no way that's true

like, the number of variables/assumptions in that purported calculation is bonkers - what unit are we converting all these "resources" to? Dollars? kWh? MMBtu?

for ex.

pick any unit you like as long as both sides are in the same unit. if the idea that assigning a precise cost to something is intractable therefore it shouldn't be attempted, then you might as well throw out carbon release as a cost for fossil fuels.

I just picked one variable of many. you're emphasizing hidden costs, are we gonna account for hidden benefits (avoided energy costs - which are pretty tricky to calculate on their own fwiw, avoided CO2 emissions, benefits of whatever the solar power is being used for, etc.) this is not like a simple apples to apples thing, and I suspect whoever came up with the original soundbyte about this just maybe had ulterior motives.

for some applications, like places with a lot of sun, but no infrastructure, solar's clearly going to win in an apples-to-apples race, but in terms of sustainable energy I don't think it's out of the realm of credibility that solar isn't yet where it needs to be on the resource usage/output balance sheet.

If you just needed one variable, this one seems pretty worrisome on its own:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-05/five-rare-earths-crucial-for-clean-energy-seen-in-short-supply.html

so if a new rare earth mine is dug to build a solar panel that prevents a mountain in Virginia from being fracked how do you quantify that

me, personally? i'd take the fracking issue as independent of the environmental costs of mining because ideally neither should happen, and neither are sustainable. if you don't take the mining costs into consideration, then you couldn't justify investing in some technological advance in solar tech that would minimize or eliminate the need for these costly metals. at a minimum, I'd say you'd saved however many gallons of fuel used by the construction equipment, electricity used in operation, etc...

x-post
I think costs per energy unit should be computed based only on their intrinsic costs. Then the replacement values of one source over the other can be argued. For example, solar works out to be 10% more expensive than coal, *but* it saves Virginia from being fracked to hell so it's a better option.

yeah if you could bake in costs of fracking into natural gas etc... it'd be much easier to make a comparison. there was something interesting in that nuclear article posted upthread about insurance costs for nuclear making it prohibitive in germany. the factoring in of hidden costs seems like a great job for actuaries.

me, personally? i'd take the fracking issue as independent of the environmental costs of mining because ideally neither should happen, and neither are sustainable. if you don't take the mining costs into consideration, then you couldn't justify investing in some technological advance in solar tech that would minimize or eliminate the need for these costly metals. at a minimum, I'd say you'd saved however many gallons of fuel used by the construction equipment, electricity used in operation, etc...

― Philip Nunez, Monday, November 12, 2012 7:01 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wait what? How are you going to build solar tech without mining...anything?

Isn't the amount of time it takes to get a nuclear reactor up, from application t groundbreaking to supplying electricity, something like 20 years?

IE DARNED GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/11/13/0214240/tapping-shale-reserves-us-would-become-worlds-top-oil-producer-by-2017

When I heard that report testerday all I could think was that handing US oil companies and the US population a huge increase in oil reserves is like giving blasting caps to a teething baby.

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/oilclimategrafv5.jpg

multiple xps:

☻ Other countries like China will follow the French model of certifying one or two reactor designs and mass producing them. The U.S. model in the 70s-80s had regulations incrementally changing over the design and construction phases so most reactors one-off variations with bespoke prices. The "precertified" Gen III reactor designs were made to counter this, but I think they'll mostly be made in China.

☻ Some studies have found that wind power has little effect on carbon emissions. The problems at the moment include the huge upfront emissions from the concrete in footings, and the fact output variability requires complementary "peaking" natural gas plants to shift, rather inefficiently, from stand-by to full-power on a minute to minute basis. This is less of a problem for offshore windfarms.Like most renewable energy, the huge need right now is for utility scale energy storage/battery technology, as the generating technology is pretty efficient.

☻ There's not enough indium or tellurium in the world to wire up the planet with the current CIGS or CdTe solar PV. Utility scale (ie cost effective) solar is IMO largely going to be solar thermal with heliostat mirrors, situated in the Mojave & Sahara. You can also heat up molten sodium (etc.) for fairly efficient power storage with these.

☻ Bill Gates isn't funding the travelling wave reactor design through his philanthropic foundation - its through his investment in Intellectual Ventures and thence TerraPower, which is a top 5 patent holder. I've pretty high hopes for this, as it actually does seem to solve many issues with long-term U235 supplies and the complex mechanics of reactor fueling and waste disposal. Think of these as just large static tubes of unenriched or depleted uranium with big heat exchangers, simmering a hundred feet underground for 50+ years on a single fuel load, when the reaction wave has hit the far end you just fill up the reactor cavity with concrete and forget it (the waste products have shorter half-lives than the current light water reactor fuel cycle). You could situate these pretty much anywhere with with nearby surface water as a heat sink, and low earthquake risk. Its not clear (to outside observers like myself) whether there are external reaction moderators, or if they'll just be engineered so that even in the event of failure of the thermal offtak system the system will simply conduct all waste heat to surrounding bedrock. I for one really hope that the pilot plant (probably Russia or China) works as advertised, as the travelling wave reactor design seems to solve quite a few of the outstanding issues with nuclear.

Correction: Intellectual Ventures is the top-5 patent holder, TerraPower is its spin-off to develop the TWR.

what's the time scale of how long you need to sequester the waste products under the new designs? if it's like 10 years, that would tip me over to the pro-nuke side, but if it's gone from 2 million to 1 million years, i'd still feel like they're falling into a local maxima trap.

This looks interesting

The team used the nanomaterial to build a prototype thermoelectric generator that they hope can eventually produce milliwatts of power.

Making milliwatts from nanotech is cool, but irrelevant to the Big Show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSi5zWZS0E

^^^^^Obama addressing a climate change question in today's press conference.

i wouldn't be so quick to write off the promise of more efficient solar cells based on carbon nano structures

obama fairly depressing there, admitting it exists, and vowing not to do anything unpopular about it.

Yeah, that was my takeaway. He had very detailed plans in response to so many other questions in that press conference and all he could come up with for climate change is "I'm gonna talk to some people and see what we can do, let me get back to you on that".

"We need to educate the public about the gravity of the situation. I was too busy with other things for four years, and might get to it in the next four."

Slate Staffer Will Oremus:

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he looks so tired and beaten down. can't he get biden to pinch hit a few of these?

Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters:

[S]hockingly, Sandy is probably not even the deadliest or most expensive weather disaster this year in the United States—Sandy’s damages of perhaps $50 billion will likely be overshadowed by the huge costs of the great drought of 2012. While it will be several months before the costs of America’s worst drought since 1954 are known, the 2012 drought is expected to cut America’s GDP by 0.5–1 percentage points, said Deutsche Bank Securities this week. …

While Sandy’s death toll of 113 in the U.S. is the second highest death toll from a U.S. hurricane since 1972, it is likely to be exceeded by the death toll from the heat waves that accompanied this year’s drought. The heat waves associated with the U.S. droughts of 1980 and 1988 had death tolls of 10,000 and 7,500 respectively, according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, and the heat wave associated with the $12 billion 2011 Texas drought killed 95 Americans.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/171305/my-son-age-25-has-never-been-around-cooler-average-month

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/science/earth/as-coasts-rebuild-and-us-pays-again-critics-stop-to-ask-why.html

People here have formed strong emotional attachments to their island. “There’s a lot of wildlife and a lot of bird life, and it’s just a great place to relax,” said Jay Minus, a lawyer in Mobile who owns two homes on the western end. “You can sit on the porch and watch the dolphins swim past your house.”

Seriously. The National Flood Insurance Program needs to be self-funding ($19 billion in debt, only $3 billion in revenue), and encourages stupefyingly dumb investment. I don't have a problem with there being a property insurer of last resort, but in states that have them they are also the most expensive insurers.

if you ever want to get reaaaaally depressed, talk to people about whether or not it makes sense to even think about taking climate change into account when building near the coast. i remember in grad school, a couple years after katrina, i made an off-handed remark to someone who was focusing on NOLA that maybe it didn't make sense to rebuild there when it was below sea level and would be seeing storms of greater frequency and strength for at least the next 1000 years. he didn't just disagree with me, he was offended. it didn't matter that rebuilding there isn't just a terrible financial idea, but also likely to result in numerous unnecessary deaths.

i always get a major ironic lol when anti-government people fight tooth and nail against doing anything to mitigate climate change. not sure they realize that the government is likely to be forced to play a much larger role in a future of draughts, wildfires, infectious diseases and wave after wave of pummeling storms.

Actually I take that back, a future of draughts sounds ok

I would favor a sierra nevada draught

As long as you have a good house-sweater, draughts are no problem. We just need to raise enough money to buy a house-sweater for everyone in the world = climate change solved.

I'm currently residing in NOLA, and it will shrink after the next couple of floods but will continue to exist - the non-sprawl parts are all above current sea-level, and its actually a necessary city. There isn't a better place for transferring Mississippi barge traffic to blue sea vessels, and water transport will become more important as fossil fuel costs rise. With those docks comes the need for a perhaps 300k population city. It doesn't need to be a 1.2 million metropolitan area.

Aside, Paolo Bacigalupi is my second favorite current SF author, and one of few to really embrace the ideas of climate change and resource scarcity that are making us eggheads nervous. The last one The Drowned Cities is a much better alternative to say Hunger Games.

I'm currently residing in NOLA, and it will shrink after the next couple of floods but will continue to exist - the non-sprawl parts are all above current sea-level, and its actually a necessary city.

i'm not sure that it will continue to exist. NYT put together a nice interactive graphic yesterday that showed all the major cities with various levels of sea rise. For New Orleans, they show that 5 ft of sea level rise would permanently flood 88% of the city:

http://i49.tinypic.com/2dkbn2a.png

of course, we have a ways to go before 5 ft sea level rise (100+ years). but in the intervening years, i guess it's a question of whether it's worth it to build a bunch of levees and build and rebuild after numerous catastrophic flood events. i suppose you're right, that it is such a strategically located city that it makes sense to repeatedly rebuild. these are they types of gutwrenching decisions that will be plaguing city planners until long after i'm dead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIZTMVNBjc4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1se9xbRRZL8

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/science/earth/as-coasts-rebuild-and-us-pays-again-critics-stop-to-ask-why.html

People here have formed strong emotional attachments to their island. “There’s a lot of wildlife and a lot of bird life, and it’s just a great place to relax,” said Jay Minus, a lawyer in Mobile who owns two homes on the western end. “You can sit on the porch and watch the dolphins swim past your house.”

― j., Monday, 19 November 2012 12:24 (1 week ago) Permalink

In global warming, dolphin watches YOU swim past his house.

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haha brilliant

the old "hitler was a vegetarian" ploy

He's a mathematician as well, so by H34rtland logic, all mathematicians are terrorists.

FWIW, the window behind my desktop faces directly onto a 16 ft high levee. Its a second floor window that used to have a view of the lake before the last 7 years of earthmoving, and wire fencing that blocked lake access during the work was just removed this week. The levee board property is wide enough that the levee could be readily raised another 5 feet at the same angle of repose. We can afford this sort of protection for "important" real estate with dense populations, but most of the coastal plain that stretches from Mexican border to New Jersey may lack the sort of value that would justify the cost.

http://www.nola.com/hurricane/images/nolalevees_jpg.jpg
Rt click to enlarge.

The problem for NOLA (this century, at any rate) is less floods into the protected zone, but simply the loss of all the wetland to our southeast, which has subsided dramatically over the past several centuries due to loss of silt from Mississippi floods and to a lesser extent oil extraction seawater flows into development canals. Perhaps more pressing, is that with the long-term decline of snow runoff from the Rockies and rainfall in the Midwest, brackish seawater is actually flowing upstream along the Mississippi bed to the potable water intakes. The Corps of Engineers had to build an underwater dike 10 miles downriver to prevent this flow during this drought year, but eventually the city may have to find fresh groundwater or desalinate.

In 2100 I can easily see the city as an island, drinking from desalination plants, surrounded on all sides by shallow, brackish, and mostly dead swamp of sparse cypress stumps and relics of last-ditch artificial mangrove breakwaters.

interesting information sanpaku, thanks for sharing. i still wouldn't feel comfortable living behind a levee in NOLA, though. as the header at the top of the graphic says, they're built to withstand category 3. Katrina was a 3 by the time it hit landfall (5 while still in the gulf), and those are the kinds of hurricanes that will be more frequent in the coming century. it's russian roulette.

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2012-06-18-OCI_infographic_web.jpg

Consecutive stories this morning on NPR: "Global warming is not trailing projections." "The government is auctioning off billions of acres in oil-drilling rights at the Superdome today." FORWARD.

They couldn't have picked a more ironic site than the superdome, jeez

I'm sure we'll hear someone besides Barbara Bush say it's a fine place to bunk in the future. (Chelsea Clinton's husband?)

okay so i've just watched a doc called cool it, starring bjorn lomborg who apparently has a solution to all of global warming's problems. throughout the doc, i wanted to believe what he said but for some reason it felt off, like i couldn't trust this guy. so i come to this thread do a quick search and see that Z S said not to trust him at all. i wonder if you'd care to expand a bit on why he's not to be trusted if you have the time ZS (or someone else, for that matter)

Lomborg is a statistician who likes playing advocatus diaboli, calculating things like the the balance of greater malaria under climate change with lesser cold-weather maladies like pneumonia. While there's a role for that in an honest debate, he's been a major academic source for the well funded fossil lobby disinformation campaign. I'm sure Lomborg would characterize his views as "nuanced", but frankly he's spent his public career attempting to poke holes in the climate science, and now wants to divert public spending away from green efforts and towards general development (education, healthcare etc).

Lomborg's stance (climate change will cost 2%-3% of global GDP this century) might make sense if the data was falling well to the low side of predictions, but so far the outcome of our experiment with the atmosphere is falling much closer to runaway greenhouse tipping points than past IPCC reports predicted. Lomborg's calculations largely ignore non-linear outcomes like "drought in our bread baskets" which imply widespread famine regardless of material wealth.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

i just had a giganto post on lomborg. disappeared. accidentally hit a button, went back to this page, gone. i feel so defeated

fuck, it had all these links and everything. can't believe that happened. and i don't want to do it all again but it feels so fucking NECESSARY.

oh well, i guess it's better to be concise. here's the summary of the disappeared post, without any links to back me up:

paragraph 1: sanpaku is right, and there's a lot more where that came from. Lomborg has been repeatedly debunked ever since he came to prominence. he distorts, misleads, omits, and flat out lies. then i presented 7-8 links to debunkings. great opening paragraph!

paragraph 2: TRANSITION, dramatic Frontline music: but lots of people lie...why is Lomborg so successful? he's a good looking, well-spoken Danish guy, he's got that going for him, but i think the main reason is a bit more abstract...

paragraph 3: he occupies an important space between flat-out deniers and those that are serious about climate change, it's implications, and the appropriate response. here i present a hasty caricature of those people in "the middle", calling them either ignorant or apathetic.

paragraph 4: in a simply magnificent series of sentences, i reveal that lomborg is successful because he preys on these people so effectively. he keeps the ignorant ignorant by drawing upon his arsenal of disinformation (i direct the reader to the list of debunkings above that no longer exists). he keeps the apathetic apathetic by advising everyone to do nothing now, to wait, to research, and if the shit hits the fan, to deploy geoengineering. the oil industry has long had a very similar message.

paragraph 5: in this paragraph i point out one aspect of Lomborg's slimeballism. he used to call global warming a myth. then he sorta accepted it but tried to show that it wouldn't be severe and not to worry about (using arguments that were repeatedly debunked - see nonexisting links above). then he sort of accepted it a little more but presented new false arguments. now he just tells people, literally, to "guzzle gas" because hey, what can one person do anyway?

paragraph 6: i bring up, yet again, the good ol' path of climate change deniers, from flat-out denial of any warming to an insistence that people have nothing to do with it to an admission that people may play a role but not much of one and hey i bet it'll be good for agriculture anyway to climate change is serious but there's nothing we can do about it to hey let's just geoengineer the shit out of the planet with floating space mirrors and spewing sulfur into the atmosphere. then i have a short scene/dialog where old man lomborg is sitting around an apocalyptic campfire in the year 2069 telling the youngsters "There was nothing we could do...there was nothing we can do..." to no response.

paragraph 7: i try to reiterate that what's missing from Lomborg's argument is the urgent need to do something NOW. while it's a good thing to bump up the research in clean energy, relying on that alone is a death sentence. we have the tools we need right now to greatly mitigate climate change - putting a price on carbon, paired with robust deployment of existing clean energy and efficiency technologies. moreover, the more we do to PREVENT climate change right NOW, the easier/less expensive adaptation will be. this has been shown over and over and over again by numerous studies.

damn, now i want to read the actual thing

just teasing btw. your portrayal sounds q otm

Lomborg's stance (climate change will cost 2%-3% of global GDP this century) might make sense if the data was falling well to the low side of predictions, but so far the outcome of our experiment with the atmosphere is falling much closer to runaway greenhouse tipping points than past IPCC reports predicted. Lomborg's calculations largely ignore non-linear outcomes like "drought in our bread baskets" which imply widespread famine regardless of material wealth.

this "stance" ("posture" might be a better word, because Lomborg is always adjusting his pose to make the most effective argument to do nothing) is a good example of how Lomborg distorts facts and figures.

From The Guardian:

He (Lomborg) reiterates that he has never denied anthropogenic global warming, and insists that he long ago accepted the cost of damage would be between 2% and 3% of world wealth by the end of this century. This estimate is the same, he says, as that quoted by Lord Stern, whose report for the British government argued that the world should spend 1-2% of gross domestic product on tackling climate change to avoid future damage.

The Stern report estimated that damage at 5-20% of GDP, however, not 2-3%. The difference, according to Lomborg, is that the two use a different "discount factor". This is the method by which economists recalculate the value today of money spent or saved in the future – or, to put it another way, the value today of this generation's grandchildren's lives. Neither is measurably "right", he says: they are judgments, albeit ones with a profound impact on subsequent analysis of the costs and benefits of spending money now to stop climate change.

in case the message is lost in there, Lomborg tries to add legitimacy to his new posture by saying that his views are the same as those of the Stern Report, highly respected comprehensive report on the economic impacts of climate change put together for the British Government by the well-known economist Nicholas Stern. but one of the most disturbing aspects of the report was that the damage had a high tail end - up to 20% of global GDP by the end of the century! Lomborg quietly uses a different discount factor to morph that number to "2 to 3%". but he knows that few will ever press him on that detail, and if they do, few will ever press him on the details of how he changed the discount factor, and few will ever really understand what that means. so he still achieves his goal - he can adjust his climate change "stance" to appear more realistic and in line with actual experts, and at the same time he dilute and distort the actual figure to appear less extreme, and then advocate for doing nothing today and focusing on research/geoengineering instead.

anyway, wow, this never happens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzw1dZNWiL8

that'd be so sweet if we could get a tearful bjorn lomborg to apologize for misleading everyone

thanks sanpaku and ZS. basically lomborg has found this perfect niche of those who don't know much about global warming and believe it exists and he's milking it. what i got from that doc is that he wants to invest in r&d for renewable energies (which sounds like something that is needed) and do some geo-engineering if need be. tbh all that geo-engineering sounds very kooky (a man-made volcano to spout ash that protects the earth from the sun's rays ?!?!) and i guess we don't really know if it'll work. as you say, he is very dangerous since he says global warming exists but there is no sense of urgency in the solutions he has to offer.

Slowclap.gif

There was a big wave of concern for global warming in the USA after An Inconvenient Truth, too. And after Katrina. Yet, somehow all these 'changed lives' seemed to slip right back to doing what they were used to doing before they changed. Because this is a crisis that requires massive coordinated changes to the infrastructure and until that happens, the old ruts will recapture almosty everyone who tries to get out of them. It has to be solved through government policy.

oh also, are there like a few books you'd recommend on this subject ? (ideally they'd have to be available as ebooks, cos i care about the planet but mostly i'm somewhere with no easy access to physical books) specific writers whose articles i should look out for online ?

it is amazing that koch industries, a major player in the climate change denial business, was started by the guy that built stalin's oil pipelines, who also just so happened to be a founder of the john birch society. if a james bond movie featured his sons as villains, no one would buy it. and here we are in reality, with not enough people buying that climate change is happening. we are a peculiar species

oh also, are there like a few books you'd recommend on this subject ?

good question! but which subject? the decades long disinformation campaign? geo-engineering? clean energy? a general scare-the-shit-out-of-you discussion of the predicted impacts? (like the mckibben article from the thread title)?

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas is a good, still somewhat current (2008, based on 2001 IPCC predictions) survey of predicted impacts.

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth by Mark Hertsgaard is a bit more up to date, and lays out consequences for specific places (like Shanghai, my Louisiana birthplace etc.)

Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming - The Illustrated Guide to the Findings of the IPCC is a nice visual guide - should be a required high school text.

Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats by Gwynne Dyer is a nice primer on defense/intelligence planning scenarios on mid-century social consequences.

Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth by paleoclimatologist Curt Stager looks at the long "tail" of our current atmosphere experiment. Its a reminder that we're making decisions in a couple of generations that will impact thousands of generations, far longer than recorded history.

I can't really recommend the James Lovelock books, unless you are a fan of fatalism. Have no personal interest in more detailed studies of the disinformation campaign: the idea that we have professionals in deception isn't really news to witnesses of much of the 20th century.

For an easy to read, not especially technical and nowhere near comprehensive book that you should be able to pick up cheaply used, read quickly, and understand the science in it, maybe try Field Notes From a Catastrophe, by Elizabeth Kolbert.

It scans what climate scientists were fretting about circa 2006. The subject matter of the fretting hasn't really changed much since then, only the data. It explains ideas like permafrost methane releases, albedo effect, and so on. Doesn't touch on the politics of climate change much.

Kolbert's book also has this great summarizing sentence:

“It may seem impossible to imagine that technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

On the disinformation campaign, check out Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes & Conway). It's not solely about climate change - it's also about the disinformation campaigns on other issues like smoking and secondhand smoke, acid rain, the ozone layer, etc - but it's amazing to see how similar the tactics have been, and especially how in many cases there are a cluster of organizations or even a single person that runs like a thread on these issues for decades. i agree with Sanpaku that it's not really news that there are professional evil people. but i think it's important to understand to the greatest degree possible how these people operate, who funds them, and why it works so well on such a significant portion of the population.

xpost That sentence, while I'm sure it made sense in context, doesn't stand well on its own. It's harder for me to imagine a technologically backward society choosing to destroy itself.

There was a big wave of concern for global warming in the USA after An Inconvenient Truth, too. And after Katrina. Yet, somehow all these 'changed lives' seemed to slip right back to doing what they were used to doing before they changed. Because this is a crisis that requires massive coordinated changes to the infrastructure and until that happens, the old ruts will recapture almosty everyone who tries to get out of them. It has to be solved through government policy.

and this is such a catch-22, unfortunately. another reminder of that in today's NYT story on record 2011 global greenhouse gas emissions:

Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the climate convention, said the global negotiations were necessary but were not sufficient to tackle the problem.

“We won’t get an international agreement until enough domestic legislation and action are in place to begin to have an effect,” she said in an interview. “Governments have to find ways in which action on the ground can be accelerated and taken to a higher level, because that is absolutely needed.”

the united states doesn't want to commit to anything until the largest developing countries commit to big emission cuts. the largest developing countries don't want to commit to anything until the united states (by far the leading historical emitter of greenhouse gases, and only eclipsed by china on an annual basis a few years ago) commits. barack obama isn't going to do jack shit unless he receives enough pressure from the american public, and the public's attention span for this kind of thing is incredibly short. the past few years have seen record droughts, crazy weather events, Sandy, etc, so this year "belief" in climate change is even higher than belief in evolution (whoa, great job americans!!). but this year it will snow somewhere and next June it will be relatively cold somewhere, and the disinformation campaign will regroup and attack in new and unexpected ways. so we're left with hoping for spontaneous government intervention.

xp Sufjan:
From Easter's End by Jared Diamond (really utter classic ecology essay, up there with "Tragedy of the Commons").

As we try to imagine the decline of Easter (Island)’s civilization, we ask ourselves, “Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”

The difference, is that we have tens of thousands of scientists whose job includes pointing out the unsustainability of our practices and the likely consequences. We've got a lot more moral culpability than the Easter Islanders.

Thanks, Sanpaku. That was a good read. I guess my point is that the following quote from your link is a much more complete thought than the one provided from Kolbert:

If mere thousands of Easter Islanders with only stone tools and their own muscle power sufficed to destroy their society, how can billions of people with metal tools and machine power fail to do worse? But there is one crucial difference. The Easter Islanders had no books and no histories of other doomed societies. Unlike the Easter Islanders, we have histories of the past--information that can save us. My main hope for my sons’ generation is that we may now choose to learn from the fates of societies like Easter’s.

Is there a collection of classic ecology essays anywhere? I've read some basic examples in elementary school biology: algae/fish in a pond, reindeer on St. Matthew island. Is there a classic book that links these examples with systems of differential equations?

I'm guessing the latter would just be any college level textbook on ecology. Pardon my ignorance. I'll go to the campus library today and check out some books. I was somehow able to take more chemistry in undergrad in lieu of biology. I really regret it now.

I'm not aware of any. And math formulae are kryptonite for mass publishers. I suppose for current important papers you could look at something like this collection of classic publications

A bit tangental, but I do think that Paul A. Colinvaux's Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare: An Ecologist's Perspective (1979) does for ecology what Lewis Thomas's Lives of a Cell (1978) was for cell biology, a literate collection of essays that summarizes the state and breath of the field as it existed in the 1970s.

^did for cell biology. I'm not that illiterate. I just can't be arsed to proofreed after cutting and pasting...

Hasn't there been a lot of pushback and/or controversy re: Diamond and/or "Easter's End" with regards to his methodology? Or is this ginned up controversy in the vein of intelligent design?

It was an op/ed by a public unknown for Discover magazine in 1995 which launched his public career, before Guns, Germs & Steel and Collapse. Diamond, like say Sagan, is known now as a popularizer. The essay was the seed that created his post-academic career, but there are no powerful lobbies opposing the results of Easter Island archaeological and paleo-ecology studies he related.

wow, looks like IPCC5 is going to leave out the permafrost carbon feedback (again)?

it's still years away! wtf?

the world desperately needs a better vehicle for delivering scientific consensus reports than the IPCC. what a fucking disaster.

Second the votes for the Kolbert and Lynas books. A good starter is probably the McKibben-edited Global Warming Reader--lots of articles and book extracts in thematic and chronological order, which is a good summary as well as giving good intros to the work and writing styles of Kolbert, etc, for further reading.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0143121898.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

The essay was the seed that created his post-academic career, but there are no powerful lobbies opposing the results of Easter Island archaeological and paleo-ecology studies he related.

As an aside, there's a fair number of academic ones in recent years. Diamond's narrative about what happened on Easter Island is very much disputed.

Very interested, f. hazel, and I'd love to see some links.

I suspect J. Diamond is in the crosshairs of a lot of archaeologists for stepping on toes. He is, after all, just an ornithologist who stepped into the cultural rise and collapse game in a very big way. National Geographic miniseries etc. And his Collapse is somewhat woolly and unfocused compared to Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies.

Thanks for the tip on the Mark Hertsgaard book. Read his Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future about ten years ago and that was a real eye-opener for me.

thanks for the book recommendations, those should keep me busy for a while

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/03/large_majorities_blame_sandy_on_global_warming/

69 percent of Empire State residents blame climate change for [Sandy], while just 24 percent think it was “isolated weather events,” according to a Siena Research Institute poll released this morning. That includes at least 63 percent of voters in every region of the state, and even a near-majority — 46 percent — of Republicans. Two-thirds of independent voters also blame climate change.

speaking of Elizabeth Colbert and Obama doing jackshit, here's an excerpt from her opening article on the prospects of a carbon tax in this week's New Yorker:

...One key player who has not embraced the idea is Barack Obama. The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, was asked about the tax last month, en route, as it happens, to visit storm-ravaged areas of New York with the President. "We would never propose a carbon tax, and have no intention of proposing one," Carney told reporters. This was taken by some to mean that Obama was opposed to the tax and by others to mean just that he was not going to be the one to suggest it.

i didn't elaborate on the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group that shared a nobel prize with owl gore a few years back for their work on the IPCC4 summary report on climate change) decision to exclude the impacts of permafrost carbon feedback from their next summary report (due in 2014) last night, mainly because i was experimenting with a tequila drink that was fucking gross. here's why it's a big deal.

here's an incredibly oversimplified depiction of the permafrost carbon feedback loop:

http://i49.tinypic.com/13ydkzo.jpg

the warmer it gets in the northern hemisphere - which inconveniently, is where the earth is warming faster than anywhere else - the more that permafrost thaws. when permafrost thaws, it releases greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which then contributes to rising temperatures.

globally, permafrost is currently a carbon sink, which means that it absorbs more carbon than it releases to the atmosphere. if when permafrost significantly melts, it's a big problem for two reasons. first, there's a ton of it: there's about twice as much carbon in permafrost as there is in the atmosphere. secondly, much of the carbon that's stored in permafrost is released as methane rather than CO2. methane is about 25 times as potent as a heat-trapping gas than CO2. fuuuuuuuuuck. and you might think "permafrost is called PERMAfrost, it goes really deep into the ground, it's not all going to melt, sheesh", but research from way back in 2005 found that the area of permafrost will drop from 4 million square miles to 1.5 square miles if we stabilize at 550ppm of ghg (hint: we're going to blow past that unless santa claus comes and saves us all).

permafrost is projected to become a carbon source by the mid-2020s, which means that permafrost will be a net carbon emitter rather than an absorber. it's difficult to overstate the importance of this. it's like you're fighting a fire and suddenly your hose starts shooting out gasoline instead of water.

notice the date on that last part: mid-2020s. keeping in mind that the carbon cycle has about a 30-year lag (meaning that the greenhouse gases we emit today take about 30 years to work their way through the carbon cycle and into the atmosphere), that means that it's already too late to stop the permafrost carbon feedback loop. if we would have somehow completely stopped all greenhouse gas emissions in the mid-90s, we might have had a chance of stopping it. instead, we just set a record for global ghg emissions in 2011, and when the final stats come in for 2012, they're expected to be even higher.

phew, this is getting long and probably unreadable. sorry. but to bring all this back for a second, when you read about climate scientists stressing that we should not exceed 450ppm if we want to have a decent shot at averting total catastrophe, this is what they're talking about. it's not like at 450ppm there's a certain temperature, and that at 460ppm the temperature is just too high and now everyone's sweating their asses off. it's that at a certain point, you run a serious risk of triggering "tipping points", or feedback loops. once you trigger those feedback loops, there's very little chance of reversing runaway climate change. recently, some climate scientists (and bill mckibben's well-known environmental group) have been saying that 350ppm should be the limit we shoot for. note that we passed 350ppm in the late 1980s. and now we're seeing the true meaning of that. we passed 350ppm long ago, running the risk of triggering dangerous carbon feedback loops, and now here we are in 2012, with permafrost about to flip to a carbon source in the 2020s, and no chance of stopping it.

which makes the IPCC decision to not include it in their IPCC5 2014 report RIDICULOUS. the permafrost feedback was already well known before their FOURTH report in 2007. since major research came out on it in 2005, which is just about the deadline for research to be included in the fourth report, perhaps they had an excuse then. but to not include it now is just malicious. fox news and your crazy uncle like to portray IPCC as some radical organization, but in fact is is incredibly conservative, and in fact is almost designed to be that way. it moves at a snail's pace (reports every 6-7 years), ensuring that the latest research isn't included. reports require sign off from every goddamn UN nation, including those that owe their economic viability almost solely to fossil fuels. and every country has veto power. the report that comes out, far from being the radical vision of owl gore, is in fact a heavily watered-down, neutered report. that's why a common refrain in climate science news is "this study shows that things are much WORSE than the IPCC report". and at this pace, if/when the permafrost feedback is included in the sixth IPCC report, it'll come out in 2021, just two or three years before permafrost is a carbon source, even though it was already acknowledged as a huge issue as early as 2005. fuck.

sorry to kill the thread again! maybe this will revive it:

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Arctic-Death-Spiral.jpg

all of the lighter shaded lines are projected ice extents from various models. the solid black line represents the mean of those models - the "ensemble mean". the dotted lines above and below the solid black line represent ice extents that are one standard deviation above and below the ensemble mean. the thick red line represents the actual observations.

the fact that the observed arctic ice extent is rapidly falling below a standard deviation away from the ensemble mean is very significant, both figuratively and statistically speaking.

more here: http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/

in addition to the declining extent of the arctic sea ice, it's also getting thinner. there's a nice discussion and animation of this at http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/article/2012/arctic-sea-ice-getting-thinner-younger, but they decided to make it a video that can't be easily shared and is gigantic (60MB). when i get home i think i'll make a simple gif out of it (less than 1MB, sharable almost anywhere). the government is so far behind the times with stuff like that, even a relatively forward-thinking organization like NASA/NOAA.

I don't know why I let myself get riled by this stuff, but uggh, the sort of pernicious shite that gets published by the right wing press in this country:

http://doughtyblog.dailymail.co.uk/2012/12/cold-out-isnt-it-we-had-a-couple-of-decades-in-which-decembers-were-muggy-rather-than-cold-and-snow-was-extremely-un.html

Question for all: is capitalism realistic economic system within global warming context?

not the post-Clinton megacorp model, no

last night at the corner deli i overheard a grizzled old timer and a younger guy comisserate about how fast the arctic ice was melting. gives me some hope that people are talking about this more.

xpost pure capitalism is not since the costs associated with global warming don't show up on the xls until it's too late. luckily, we don't have that here.

it is ridiculous to think that the stability of an economic system would be perfectly linked to an environmental one. There's a point on the oil reserves plot where we should stop (we've probably already passed it). There's a point on the same chart where oil prices go up. The two points are not the same.

*the stability of an environmental one

we also don't have perfect knowledge of the plot. you can do a 'back-of-the-envelope' thermodynamic calculation to guess how much oil exists. but the error on that figure is huge. and you still don't know how much is attainable.

so capitalism alone would fail for sure. that's my point. most people on this thread could have said it better. i am here to learn. please post more interesting plots, Z S.

to start with, i suggest we incorporate danny devito

but i'm not sure that knowing the exact amount of global recoverable oil reserves is that important with respect to climate change. the far more important number is the amount of greenhouse gases we can emit in the future while still giving ourselves a fighting chance to avert total climate disaster (that of course is bound to be an estimate, but the mckibben article from this thread's title suggests 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide). we already know for certain that there are waaaaaaaaaaaaay more than enough recoverable oil reserves to surpass that limit.

it's kind of like drinking water from the ocean (well not really but hey). if you're drinking seawater, the important number is not how much seawater there is but how much seawater you can drink before you die. there's more than enough out there, that's certain!

and before anyone steps in, i mean, of course it's important to know as much as possible about global oil reserves. it affects the market, of course, and it affects decisions about switching to clean energy. i'm just saying that we have more than enough information on oil reserves + the impact of burning fossil fuels on the climate to realize that we need to stop burning them as soon as possible. even if we would have stopped 20 years ago it might have been too late.

all my possible plots on climate change are dystopias and star sweaty shirtless men with ammunition draped across both shoulders

One problem for capitalism in any lingering disaster scenario is that nearly all money is someone's liability, and the interest on that debt is only repayable in a growing economy. But the last four years have demonstrated that capitalists (ie, banks, institutional investors, and yes private savers) are willing to accept negative real yields from governments when scared shitless, so I'm pretty dubious about Chris Martenson-esque crash courses re: peak climate/peak oil and the collapse of money systems.

zs your giant post made me feel worse about this subject which is a pretty significant achievement at this point

Then again, I've no idea what Lee means by "capitalism". If s/he means global mega-corporations, all of them will have serious issues with supply chains. But captitalism meaning "directing investment from savers to prospective enterprises through financial intermediaries?" That's been going on 4000 years and I don't see any reason it wouldn't be viable even if there were a few million of us huddling around the Arctic ocean. Even small farming towns have banks.

xpost hahaha, sorry! but now, when the IPCC5 report comes out in 2014 and it's dire, you'll be able to depress your friends by saying "actually, since the report doesn't even include the permafrost carbon feedback it almost certainly underestimates the impacts of climate change"

people loooooove to hang out with climate realists

You know, I don't mind IPCC not modeling things they don't really know (at the moment) how to model. Some similar issues include Amazon drought & forest fire, or even phytoplankton biomass in more acidic oceans. As far as I'm aware, neither lend themselves (at the moment) to analytic modeling, unlike other positive feedbacks (CO2 solubility in warming seawater).

But ought to disclose the omission(s), and the likely impact of unmodelled positive feedbacks on outcomes, in bold print, on the first page of the report summary.

The destruction of the environment must be embraced in order for homo sapiens to evolve.

Let the oceans dry out and the koalas burn. Humans were not meant to be beings of flesh but gods of steel, plastic and silicon.

plastic? we'll need more petrochemicals for that

We grant an exception for organic matter that has been dead for millennia.

somehow i missed the recent guardian that revealed that obama's decision to not talk about climate change can actually be traced back to a meeting in March 2009.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/nov/01/obama-strategy-silence-climate-change

Think I'll hold off reading that for a while.

By capitalism, I should've said consumption- and/or growth-based economic systems, but mostly the latter. When so much of our economy is centered around the idea of continual growth, which of course requires resource consumption...

hey guys I know global warming & climate change is mega depressing but try reading this it'll make you feel better

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

Banaka otm. Let the koalas burn.

wow, 乒乓 otm

http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/b/4/5/b454ac1f2f8bd9c458b46bcbaebb9bd5.png Scale of an estimated Poincaré recurrence time for the quantum state of a hypothetical box containing a black hole with the estimated mass of the entire Universe, observable or not, assuming Linde's chaotic inflationary model with an inflaton whose mass is 10−6 Planck masses.

^really puts things into perspective

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip

In their scenario for = −1.5, the galaxies would first be separated from each other. About 60 million years before the end, gravity would be too weak to hold the Milky Way and other individual galaxies together. Approximately three months before the end, the solar system (or systems similar to our own at this time, as the fate of our own solar system 7.5 billion years in the future is questionable) would be gravitationally unbound. In the last minutes, stars and planets would be torn apart, and an instant before the end, atoms would be destroyed.[1]

http://i.imgur.com/mr0Kn.png

rip gr80

Nah, shield volcanos over hotpots have pretty mild eruptions. The earth drools basalt rather placidly compared to the explosive vomiting of melted crust from stratovolcanos at continental margins.

xp Big_Rip:

What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!

wow that is the best wikipedia article i have maybe ever seen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

so, putting together a couple of entries on this timeline:

the "arecibo message" was transmitted into space in 1974. if it's received and a reply is sent by the same method, by the time it arrives, the niagara falls will no longer exist, having eroded away to nothing

~stares into space for several minutes~

... space stares back.

in addition to the declining extent of the arctic sea ice, it's also getting thinner. there's a nice discussion and animation of this at http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/article/2012/arctic-sea-ice-getting-thinner-younger, but they decided to make it a video that can't be easily shared and is gigantic (60MB). when i get home i think i'll make a simple gif out of it (less than 1MB, sharable almost anywhere).

finally got around to it:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/0f11c28322e21e504a84557d1b94850e/tumblr_merzd5aB6n1qdmmiqo1_500.gif

that is awesomely clear and terrifying

Wow ZS. Can we share this around?

of course! just make sure to include the link to the article: http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/article/2012/arctic-sea-ice-getting-thinner-younger

xp flopson:

You might also enjoy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/world/asia/record-heat-fuels-widespread-fires-in-australia.html

Four months of record-breaking temperatures stretching back to September 2012 have produced what the government says are “catastrophic” fire conditions along the eastern and southeastern coasts of the country, where the majority of Australians live.

Data analyzed on Wednesday by the government Bureau of Meteorology indicated that national heat records had again been set. The average temperature across the country on Tuesday was the highest since statistics began being kept in 1911, at 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit), exceeding a mark set only the day before. Meteorologists have had to add two new color bands to their forecast maps, extending their range up to 129° Fahrenheit.

“Those of us who spend our days trawling — and contributing to — the scientific literature on climate change are becoming increasingly gloomy about the future of human civilization,” Elizabeth Hanna, a researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra, told The Sydney Morning Herald. “We are well past the time of niceties, of avoiding the dire nature of what is unfolding, and politely trying not to scare the public.”

I was just down there, more or less, last week, on a farm near Ulladulla, where there were a lot of trees and other bits of the bush still charred from fires back in ... 2001, maybe? So weird that the time we spent in NSW was unseasonably cool, followed by a radical shift this severe. Very scary.

Meanwhile, here in Chicago it is in the low 50s. In January. Taken as a whole, with that report calling 2012 the warmest US on record, and I'm pretty scared shitless.

it's supposed to be 60 in NJ over the weekend. one day i'll have to teach my future children how the seasons used to be. "winter was cold ... all the time. and there was a season called spring that started cool and slowly got warmer..."

Honestly, I was thinking about that in the car an hour ago. "When I was younger, we had trees, and grass was green, and you could drink the water, and the world was not always on fire ..."

The last time that there was a month with a below average global temperature was February 1985, when I was 1 1/2 years old.

320 days in Chicago with less than an inch of snow. Record.

Water level of Lake Michigan supposedly way down. Obviously the Mississippi is a wreck right now for the same reason.

What happens after 100 years and +5 degrees celsius? Does it stop, or does it keep just getting hotter and hotter until in 700 years we're baked off the planet?

It was 108 degrees in Sydney yesterday!

Apparently.

so hot australia had to add two new colors to its forecast map

http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2013/01/australia-wildfires

they are visible from space

http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2013/01/01fotos/Australia-fires-600.jpg/image_large

Doing presentation training at work, going to talk about CC to my materialist coworkers. My original topic was going to be what owning a dog can teach humans.

oh man, good luck!

i wonder what dogs could teach us about climate change?

don't shit in yr own bed i guess

or find someone to walk around behind you with a plastic bag so you never have to deal with that shit

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/01/world_population_may_actually_start_declining_not_exploding.html

i read that the other day (yesterday?) when you posted it, and although it would be great news if population would "naturally" stabilize (rather than being forced down by widespread famine/diseases) sooner rather than later, and even decline a little, the article does nothing to convince me that it will. plus, i find it really hard to take paragraphs like this seriously:

That might sound like an outrageous claim, but it comes down to simple math. According to a 2008 IIASA report, if the world stabilizes at a total fertility rate of 1.5—where Europe is today—then by 2200 the global population will fall to half of what it is today. By 2300, it’ll barely scratch 1 billion. (The authors of the report tell me that in the years since the initial publication, some details have changed—Europe’s population is falling faster than was previously anticipated, while Africa’s birthrate is declining more slowly—but the overall outlook is the same.) Extend the trend line, and within a few dozen generations you’re talking about a global population small enough to fit in a nursing home.

They hold up Germany as the OMG what if everyone's birth rate falls this low? example. OK, worst-case-scenarios are how journalism works* - but there's no argument offered as to why Germany should provide the model.

It is interesting that they don't mention the situation in the UK, which is that fertility rates have been rising year-on-year since 2001 and are now nearing 2. That increase in fertility is mainly accounted for by white britishers, not immigrant populations.

The author also disregards the fact that death rates are still falling. Annual births still exceed deaths in the UK, so the population would be increasing even without immigration.

*Personally think this is a p. cool scenario

Predicting future birth rates is a bit of a mug's game

xp Bnad:

Given the ultimate atmospheric carbon load the Earth system approaches a new equilibrium between solar radiation and the amount reradiated. Assuming radiative forcing stabilizes at 2100 levels, a further 0.5 °C mean temperature increase is expected by 2200 as the deep oceans warm up to equilibrium. Here's a longer term chart of climate models from IPCC 2007:

http://clivebest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/figure-ts-32-l.png

But there's a lot of carbon in natural reservoirs, like drying/burning equatorial rainforests, melting/decaying permafrost (worth maybe 1 °C) and destabilizing seabed methane clathrates (I've seen no good estimates here, because but the clathrates vary so widely in depth/vulnerability, but the total amount (2,000 ~ 10,000 Gt) is multiples larger than current atmospheric carbon). These tipping point effects are not modeled in the current or planned IPCC scenarios, likely due to high uncertainty in the amounts and pace of those natural releases.

During the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago, 2500-6800 Gt of carbon were released over a few thousand years, resulting in a 6 °C rise that gradually subsided over the ensuing 200,000 years. The large PETM δ13C excursion seen in seabed cores suggests that runaway greenhouse emissions of biogenic methane clathrates was responsible. Using this as a model, we won't become Venus (not in this billion years), as the vast majority of terrestrial carbon is locked way in crustal carbonite rock, but we're making decisions this generation that will effect the next thousand generations.

^ ...were responsible...affect the next 1000 generations... Want a post editor here...

At this rate, 2200 seems an awful long way away. I'm pretty worried about 2013 or 2014.

Gave my presentation, muffed a point about economy and adaptation costs I wanted to make to the debt hawks in the crowd, and the one question I got was, "So... you're a member of that... EPA, huh?"

haha, i've been there

in that situation, i mean

Snowed in the middle east. Israel, Saudi Arabia ...

Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1754/20122845.full

Indeed, if humanity is very unlucky with the climate, there may be reductions in yields of major crops [45], although near-term this may be unlikely to affect harvests globally [46].

Feels like this is inevitable, actually, but I can't back that feeling up right now.

even without climate change, future crop yields are uncertain anyway. annual growth in crop yields after the agricultural green revolution has been declining for years, and it's fully stagnated or worse in many areas (from the abstract of a Nature article published a few weeks ago: "Although yields continue to increase in many areas, we find that across 24–39% of maize-, rice-, wheat- and soybean-growing areas, yields either never improve, stagnate or collapse." maintaining continued growth (to meet population growth) is already turning into a battle between monsanto and their industrial budz vs a declining stock of land resources, both in terms of quantity and quality. we deplete our topsoil at a rate that is 10 to 40 times faster than it's ability to regenerate itself (100-400 years per cm). and about 40% of the soil that we do use is classified as either degraded or seriously degraded.

all of that's before you consider climate change.

I hadn't seen this before layed out so plainly before, but Gwynne Dyer corresponds with the leading lights of the field, so I don't doubt it:

The rule of thumb is that we lose ten per cent of global food production for every rise in average global temperature of one degree C.

So, if we're on a path to 9 billion and a 3 °C, we just need to collectively decide which third of our descendands will starve.

NYT Dismantles its Environment Desk

The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. No decision has been made about the fate of the Green Blog, which is edited from the environment desk.

it's with a heavy heart, but we need more reporters on the rooftop beehive beat.

Here's a relevant quote from an article published just a week ago:

“I ask myself, ‘In 20 years, what will we be proudest that we addressed, and where will we scratch our head and say why didn’t we focus more on that?’” said Glenn Kramon, assistant managing editor of the New York Times.

The Times published the most stories on climate change and had the biggest increase in coverage among the five largest U.S. daily papers, according to media trackers at the University of Colorado.

“Climate change is one of the few subjects so important that we need to be oblivious to cycles and just cover it as hard as we can all the time,” Kramon said….

Kramon, the Times‘ assistant managing editor, attributed last year’s uptick in the paper’s coverage to the fruition of a 4-year-old effort to group top reporters on a separate environment desk.

http://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2012/01/media_coverage_climate_change.jpeg.492x0_q85_crop-smart.jpg

i'm pretty sure we're fucked on climate change. that's my latest thing to come to terms with, along with turning 30 and my inevitable demise.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/at-a-protest-science-and-religion-team-up/

this gives me some hope at least

so, two different national environmental "conversations" happening this week.

1) the first and less prominent topic was the release of a lengthy report from Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol that analyzed the demise of the big cap-and-trade bill in 2010. apologies for linking to a bunch of grist articles, but they had great coverage of this, including a summary of the report which will probably be much more widely read than the analysis itself, which is 100+ pages. Skocpol lays much of the blame on environmental organizations for failing to build enough grassroots support and for failing to adequately respond to the infamous Coalition of Idiotic Uncles (aka the tea party) that vomited all over actual discussions of climate and health care policy at the time.

on that area (the tea party's impact on the demise of the bill), Skocpol's analysis is great. it's an aspect that hasn't really been studied enough, at least not that i've seen. but many people took issue with her laying the blame at the feet of environmental organizations while mostly excluding all of the other malevolent factors: big oil, disinformation campaigns, terrible media coverage.

grist's David Roberts devoted 3 articles to the topic that are worth reading:

http://grist.org/climate-energy/what-theda-skocpol-gets-right-about-the-cap-and-trade-fight/
http://grist.org/politics/the-road-forward-from-cap-and-trade/
http://grist.org/politics/if-you-want-to-pass-climate-legislation-fix-u-s-politics/

eric pooley, who wrote the excellent book The Climate War, also weighed in: http://grist.org/climate-energy/why-the-climate-bill-failed-its-not-that-simple/

2) then there was the surprise emphasis on climate change in the inaugural speech:

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.

The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

there's a lot to say about that, and god i hope he's actually willing to talk about climate change for the next 4 years for a change. the emphasis that he placed on it prompted a lot of coverage/speculation, much of which assumes that any action on climate change will and must come from EPA, because congress is a lost cause. that's probably correct, i guess. in any case, it's a fucking shame that it's apparently not realistic to consider legislative action, especially given the context of the focus on debt and the deficit. a carbon tax could be implemented that channels some of the money back to people (to reduce the burden of the tax on lower-income people), some of the money to the federal coffers to address the needs of deficit pantshitters, and some of the money toward clean energy R&D and deployment.

anyway, in response to the inauguration speech, joe romm mentioned something that will provide an early tell into whether or not obama is going to attempt to compromise with the atmosphere or if he's actually going to take a stand: "We will soon see if these words have any meaning whatsoever — since approving the Keystone XL pipeline would utterly vitiate them."

YES

http://content.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2013/01/sierra-club-engage-civil-disobedience-first-time-organizations-history

The Sierra Club Board of Directors has approved the one-time use of civil disobedience for the first time in the organization’s 120-year history.

Recognizing the imminent danger posed by climate disruption, including record heat waves, drought, wildfires and the devastation of superstorm Sandy, the Sierra Club board of directors has suspended a long-standing Club policy to allow, for one time, the organization to lead a group of environmental activists, civil rights leaders, visionaries, scientists, and other high-profile individuals in a peaceful protest to dirty and dangerous tar sands. The action will be by invitation only and is being co-sponsored by 350.org.

i only wish that it was open to everyone (not just high-profile people).

second guessing myself here, as usual.

just now i was reading joe romm's take that the odds are that the keystone xl pipeline won't be approved, largely because john kerry will be the one making the decision at state, and he seems to get it. last summer he described a "conspiracy of silence" about climate change in congress: "It is a conspiracy that has not just stalled, but demonized any constructive effort to put America in a position to lead the world on this issue….
Climate change is one of two or three of the most serious threats our country now faces, if not the most serious, and the silence that has enveloped a once robust debate is staggering for its irresponsibility….
I hope we confront the conspiracy of silence head-on and allow complacence to yield to common sense, and narrow interests to bend to the common good. Future generations are counting on us."

anyway, all of that got me thinking about how different things would be if climate change were first and foremost framed as a security issue (which it is) - how many more people that would reach, how it could help to build support for it across coalitions...

which in turn made made me briefly imagine how the best case scenarios, if climate change were successfully mitigated or adapted to, would differ so widely according to the prevailing discourse that helped to save the day. if it was a security discourse, it would bring the defense industry into the equation, with all of the $ and influence that entails, but it seems like the emphasis would be on technology, defense, and adaptation - strengthening the literal physical defenses around the united states, focusing on adaptation rather than mitigation, aggressively wrapping up resources. whereas a successful moral appeal to people's better nature (almost certainly the wrong term, but i mean getting people to realize that inaction right now > millions of deaths) might put more emphasis on mitigation and conservation and place more of a burden on restraining people's habits rather than coming up with a technology to save the day. and a third, technocentric/risk management paradigm might frame the threat of climate change in more pragmatic terms and focus on energy efficiency.

fwiw though it seems like the military/security discourse option is most likely. there's too much confluence there of influence, $, a top stakeholder position on the issue and a set of industry stakeholders that would profit.

whereas most people don't care about people dying if it's more than 100 feet away or more than a year in the future. people care, but not enough to do anything.
and the public policy dream of people actually giving a shit about efficiency and models on a widespread scale is fun to think about but it seems like in real life life people are not often swayed by logic

last post on this thread for at least a month because i'm probably a post away from being permabanned

Stop 25.3 million tons carbon/year from Keystone XL, which will just be burned by China instead, while leasing 272 million tons of Federal land ooal mining rights every year of the first Administration, some to be exported to China as well. Its showboating.

i hate obama's record on the environment as much as anyone (it especially sucked this last year in dc as half my friends went out and stanned for him across the country) but if he's beginning to turn the corner (more accurately if for some reason he thought that it was a good option to wait to turn the corner) i'm going to do everything i can to try to support it

otm. The past is past. We can't do anything about it. If we can make things happen that need to happen, it takes precedence over what's already done and over with.

I voted for Obama this year primarily to keep Mitt out of office, but the only joy I felt in my heart about it was out of an insane hope against hope that he'd get more radical in his second term, specifically with regard to the environment.

insane indeed

"radical" got a chuckle outta me

shove it, pinko.

if climate change were first and foremost framed as a security issue (which it is)

Do you mean beyond the usual drought leads to conflict equation? Or something along the lines of, " Nature: Nature's greatest terrorist!"?

"Mt Saint Helens was an inside job!"

it does mean changing the entire economy, so with a third of the country certifiably nuts, good luck.

mean getting people to realize that inaction right now > millions of deaths

embarrassingly i was sorta wasted at 10pm on a wednesday when i wrote that, so it's probably not clear that the ">" meant "will lead to", not "is greater than".

White House spokesman Jay Carney Jan. 23 deflated environmentalists’ hope of a major federal program to counter climate change, by declaring that the “we have no intention of proposing a carbon tax.”
Carney’s statement is a letdown for progressive climate-control advocates, who say the federal government has the regulatory and taxing power to try to affect the globe’s temperature by curbing the release of carbon dioxide from cars, houses, factories, power plants….

“I think the President has long supported congressional action on climate change,” Carney said Jan. 22. But “he looks at [climate control] in a more holistic way, and he will move forward in implementing some of the [regulatory and spending] actions that he took in the first term,” he said.

well, didn't take long to bust the bubble on that one.

“Obama made a point of highlighting how much emphasis he gave the issue after Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) thanked him afterward for mentioning climate change.

“‘I didn’t just mention it, I talked about it,’ Obama parried, according to Waxman.”

WAY TO GO!

he's great at talking about shit. see, this way we can all feel like we're president when we talk about it.

"You realize that you shouldn't have to be thanked for talking about an issue that directly threatens the lives of everyone living for the next thousand years, correct?", Waxman reportedly countered.

"I didn't shit my pants this week - how about THAT?!", Obama responded.

I feel like this was written by someone in this thread.

i quite like richard muller on climate change, his BEST project is a nice resource

http://berkeleyearth.org/

and there's loads of stuff on youtube where he explains things very simply so idiots like me can understand

lots of interesting things discussed here too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOfsSYsvQnI

It's nice that Richard Muller apparently had a come to jesus moment. A few years ago he was chiefly known as a climate change skeptic. In fact, when his BEST project showed that climate change was real and overwhelmingly caused by human beings - to the surprise of no one except for the Koch Brothers, who were the single largest funders of the project - he even published an op-ed in the NYT called The Conversion of a Climate Change Skeptic.

In that same op-ed, he also attacks a bunch of strawmen and tosses out a bunch of red herrings. e.g., "Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming." - yeah, no kdding! No single storm can be attributed to global warming. That's why no one who knows what they're talking about says that. He also refers to the possibility that global temperatures were higher during the "medieval warm period", which is a common skeptic argument that 1)isn't true) and 2)wouldn't even matter if it was true, because while of course the earth has warmed in the past for "natural" reasons, the crisis of climate change today is that it's happening so quickly and that humans are clearly causing it rather than natural forces. it's kind of like as if you accidentally started a fire that was quickly spreading, and a friend walks by and says "it's ok! last summer it was 106 degrees!" well...yeah...

anyway, sorry to trash muller, and i'm not trying to squash discussion! i'm just still a little..."skeptical" of his motives. *rim shot*

Ah, that's interesting. No, trash away, I really enjoy his lectures/books so I prob give what he says too much credibility. I didn't ever get the impression that he was a full-on sceptic. He just seemed rigorously scientific in his approach. And if you watch his lectures his line is "as a scientist I really don't know" but there are always asides: "but if I was a betting man...”, “it’s obvious much change can be attributed to humans, we need to understand how, and how much…” etc.

I think this attitude can be helpful, the better we understand the causes of CC the better equipped we’ll be to focus our energies on trying to prevent/reverse the damage done. I know the flipside, if you’re a well known scientist, is that you have to be very careful with what you say and how you say it. There’s a great bit in one of his lectures where he admits how bad he (or scientists are in general) are at that.

That sceptical science website looks great btw. Cheers.

handy thing to keep in mind every time some blowhard starts talking about how addressing climate change would damage the economy: in 2011-12 alone, the economic damage from extreme weather events in the US was 188 BILLION DOLLARS

http://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ExtremeWeather_table2_021113-1.png

"we can't bring in a fire truck to put out a fire in the apartment complex; bringing in the fire department would cost over $5,000!"

and yes, i realize some of those are tornadoes. but the biggest, highest costing extreme weather events are the 2012 drought/heat wave ($78 billion), hurricane sandy ($30 billion) and the 2011 drought/heat wave ($12 billion). that's $120 billion of the damage, right there.

and yes, i realize that not every drought and hurricane can or should be blamed on climate change. but climate change increases the frequency of these events, and makes once-rare super-events much more likely. it's like rolling two dice. climate change modifies the dice so that they go up to 7 instead of just 6. rolling a 13 or a 14 becomes a legitimate possibility, and 11s and 12s, which were once very rare, now become more common.

sigh. no one's going to do anything.

maybe insurance companies will step up to the plate and force policy change.

Obama did some of his toughest talking yet re:climate last night during SOTU. Not holding my breath for him to follow through, but you never know.

The right people are crying, at least

ewwww....why does the christian science monitor have "featured content" directly from the coal lobby? seriously, i mistakenly thought that they were a respected source of journalism! i realize that every newspaper is in deep shit right now, but "featuring" content straight from industry groups seems to break at least 3000 different journalistic codes simultaneously!

they want to provide insights on the future of fuel and power, ZS

At least Boxer and Sanders are trying toraise the issue.

It's James Hansen's tax and dividend scheme. I think it would be more politically palatable if instead of a per-capita dividend the bill just incrementally decreased the payroll tax (both employee and employer shares) - same general effect, except for the unemployed/retired, more closely matches the consumer burden of an increased carbon tax, and gets employers (and hopefully science literate Republicans) on board. Toss in a retiree heating oil subsidy if you're worried about Granny freezing.

great timing

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/a-blogs-adieu/

yep. it's the result of the NYT's announcement in January that it was disbanding it's environment desk. took a few months, but here we are. it's ok, though, fox news will continue covering the environment.

1) White House officials have indicated that Obama will approve Keystone XL. here's the line of reasoning:

The official dismissed environmental groups’ contention that building the pipeline would open up vast deposits of the Alberta tar sands, and so increase the emissions that cause climate change. “There have been thousands of miles of pipelines that have been built while President Obama has been in office, and I think the point is, is that it hasn’t necessarily had a significant impact one way or the other on addressing climate change,” the official said.

wow.

2) the long-awaited proposed rule from EPA to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants is going to be delayed. there's some concern that the proposal, as it was written, was not going to be defensible during the inevitable lawsuits. also obama and his administration doesn't really care about climate change. so it's a combo. shit sandwich on rye.

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Carbon-Final.jpg

Lovely news to wake up to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7Y8w1BOFnI

gotta love the guy at 0:30 and 1:00 in who argues

i read that X is not happening. in order to solve X, we need to rely on market solutions.

listen people, global warming is NOT HAPPENING. but if we're going to solve it, you bet your ass it would be best to let industry develop technology to get us out of this mess!

2:04 in, same thing

"i definitely think there's a free market solution that won't require any government intervention to solve this"

ok great i'm all ears lay it on me

this is a pretty sweet graphic imo:

http://infobeautiful3.s3.amazonaws.com/2013/01/1276_gigatons_CO2.png

(open it in a new tab if it's too small for you)

Still small. :\

Link to the original?

Also, wtf, guy at 2:55 is all, climate change is real, we should do something about it???

http://infobeautiful3.s3.amazonaws.com/2013/01/1276_gigatons_CO2.png

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/how-many-gigatons-of-co2/

sorry if that image link isn't working! it shows up perfectly on my computer at work and also at home

Honestly I think IiB could have done a better job with the material. At the very least run the C02 injections vertically, with the predicted consequences arranged accordingly, and run the Mauna Kea CO2 measurements as a layer underneath.

Tar Sands Pipeline oil spill today: http://gawker.com/5993053/tar-sands-pipeline-ruptures-spreading-oil-across-arkansas-town?post=58657647

Pegasus is a fairly small (20 in) pipe that transported Gulf coast crude and imports to Illinois for decades, until the midwest market was swamped by Canadian imports and the flow was reversed in 2006. The break likely has nothing to do with the direction in flow, just age. Exxon's actually one of the better operators in terms of maintenance investment (certainly compared to the former Amoco cowboys responsible for Alaska spills and Deepwater Horizon - bet BP regrets that merger).

haven't read it yet, but bill mckibben (author of the article that prompted this thread) has a new long piece in rolling stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-fossil-fuel-resistance-20130411/

Thanks ZS. I'll have to save reading it for the morning though, lest it induces sleep-preventing angst.

http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/item/chart4.png

notice the slight partisan leaning of the "politicians" chunk

Global warming can't be real because if it was, we'd have to change the way we do things, which could affect our economy.

Has Obama Already Given up on Climate Change? (Ryan Lizza, New Yorker):

...But the budget released this week makes it clear that Obama’s surprising appeal to Congress was an empty piece of rhetoric. The phrase “climate change” appears twenty-nine times in the new budget, but there is no new plan for Congress to take up in Obama’s otherwise ambitious legislative blueprint. There are some worthy energy initiatives that could achieve modest reductions in emissions, but the budget is silent on what Obama will do to aggressively reduce carbon pollution by the biggest emitters, like power plants and automobiles.

It is not as if Obama doesn’t have the power to act. On many issues the President is at the mercy of Congress. He can’t reform gun laws or the immigration system, or rewrite the tax code, without coöperation from the House and Senate. Climate change is different. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, backed by the force of a Supreme Court ruling, has the authority to reduce carbon pollution through regulation. In 2010, when White House negotiators were trying to pass cap and trade, they presented reluctant senators with a promise (some called it a threat): pass a comprehensive bill to deal with the problem or the E.P.A. would move forward on its own. Three years later, the Administration has still not acted on that ultimatum. And, ominously for those who care about tackling climate change, Obama’s new budget proposes to reduce funding for the E.P.A. by 3.5 per cent compared to the current year.

Yeah, but if he pushes too hard at that, how's he going to get a second term?

Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/apr/13/climate-change-millions-starvation-scientists?CMP=twt_fd

"Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. Climate change comes on top of that. The annual production gains we have come to expect … will be taken away by climate change. We are not so worried about the total amount of food produced so much as the vulnerability of the one billion people who are without food already and who will be hit hardest by climate change. They have no capacity to adapt."

This is an interesting analysis of our world economy in relation to the natural resources it consumes. Interested to hear Sanpaku's thoughts on it.

In 100 years (after most of the non-renewable resources are depleted), I think (or perhaps hope) Herman Daly will be more important than Paul Samuelson in the economics curriculum.

I haven't gotten to reading Ecological Economics, but went fairly deep into parallel books from outside the insular economics discipline (A Prosperous Way Down, Overshoot, practically everything referenced by Jay Hanson) when I was learning about peak oil a dozen years ago.

There are expensive but plausible replacements for most non-renewables; I think phosphorus may present the biggest challenge for humanity this century.

Also:

It is, in fact, the fate of all kinds of energy of position to be ultimately converted into energy of motion. The former may be compared to money in a bank, or capital, the latter to money which we are in the act of spending … If we pursue the analogy a step further, we shall see that the great capitalist is respected because he has the disposal of a great quantity of energy; and that whether he be nobleman or sovereign, or a general in command, he is powerful only from having something which enables him to make use of the services of others. When a man of wealth pays a labouring man to work for him, he is in truth converting so much of his energy of position into actual energy… The world of mechanism is not a manufactory, in which energy is created, but rather a mart, into which we may bring energy of one kind and change or barter it for an equivalent of another kind, that suits us better—but if we come with nothing in hand, with nothing we will most assuredly return.

- Balfour Stewart, 1883

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uneconomic_growth

god i fuckin love this kind of econ shit, its been too long since college

Weird weather on the march: snow in Saudi Arabia

Congratulations folks, we finally did it!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/29/global-carbon-dioxide-levels

great article at tomdispatch about the epic fail of journalism, focusing on the failures of reporting leading up to and during the financial meltdown, and the continuous failure of global warming coverage. here's a bit from the global warming part:

Is the Press Too Big to Fail?

Now, on the great subject of our moment, the press repeatedly clutches for the rituals of detachment. Two British scholars studying climate coverage surveyed 636 articles from four top United States newspapers between 1988 and 2002 and found that most of them gave as much attention to the tiny group of climate-change doubters as to the consensus of scientists.

And if the press has, until very recently, largely failed us on the subject, the TV news is a disgrace. Despite the record temperatures of 2012, the intensifying storms, droughts, wildfires and other wild weather events, the disappearing Arctic ice cap, and the greatest meltdown of the Greenland ice shield in recorded history, their news divisions went dumb and mute. The Sunday talk shows, which supposedly offer long chews and not just sound bites -- those high-minded talking-head episodes that set a lot of the agenda in Washington and for the attuned public -- were otherwise occupied.

All last year, according to the liberal research group Media Matters,

“The Sunday shows spent less than 8 minutes on climate change... ABC's This Week covered it the most, at just over 5 minutes… NBC's Meet the Press covered it the least, in just one 6 second mention… Most of the politicians quoted were Republican presidential candidates, including Rick Santorum, who went unchallenged when he called global warming ‘junk science’ on ABC's This Week. More than half of climate mentions on the Sunday shows were Republicans criticizing those who support efforts to address climate change… In four years, Sunday shows have not quoted a single scientist on climate change.”

George Will knows better:

Although electric cars are 40 percent powered by coal, that being the percentage of U.S. electricity generated by coal, Fisker was supposed to combat global warming, of which there has been essentially none for 15 years. As adult supervision returns, Washington may take seriously the bad news about its harebrained green investments and the good news that refutes the argument for more of them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-courts-finance-committee-give-obama-adult-supervision/2013/03/29/026c8190-add4-11e2-8bf6-e70cb6ae066e_story.html

i would wager that george will has talked more about climate change on the sunday morning shows than all scientists put together.

Fisker was supposed to combat global warming, of which there has been essentially none for 15 years.

This kind of verbal feint where someone drops a known lie into a sentence as an almost-aside makes me seriously want to murder people. Our local George Will-lite, Kevin O'Brien, does this shit. Makes me want to mail him anthrax.

An album by the band Anthrax, that is, JUST IN CASE FBI.

haha people are assholes non-shocker.

A recent study found that some conservatives would not choose an efficient lightbulb with an environmental message, even when they would choose the same bulb without the message.

Conservatives excel at cutting off noses to spite faces, film at 11.

Kind of would like to sign up for a Mars 500 type of deal atm tbh.

Like George Will, Charles Krauthammer is not convinced, and his column similarly gets syndicated everywhere I think:

from his declaration of war on global warming (on a planet where temperatures are the same as 16 years ago and in a country whose CO2 emissions are at a 20-year low)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obama-the-fall/2013/05/02/6fa564c4-b348-11e2-9a98-4be1688d7d84_story.html?tid=pm_pop

Chait seems reservedly optimistic, but I don't want to get my hopes up:

And within the environmental world, it is essentially a given that Obama will enact some version of the NRDC plan. Dan Lashof, its lead author, told me, “We are hearing that they’re looking quite seriously at our proposal.” A “person familiar with the matter” told the Wall Street Journal, “You will ultimately see a proposal from EPA to regulate existing power plants.” A group of electric utilities has already circulated a paper predicting that the EPA will do just that.

New regulations would have to withstand a certain legal challenge from the energy industry—though, crucially, implementation would not have to wait as cases wind their way through the courts. The EPA’s authority has withstood several high-profile challenges before, because the law is so broadly written; on the other hand, the challenges to Obamacare remind us that precedent cannot fully predict the behavior of agitated conservative judges. Also like the Obamacare challenge, the legal fight will play out against the backdrop of political war. [...]

So the administration and its allies have been mobilizing for combat. It’s not insignificant that Obama chose Denis McDonough, who has a deep background in climate change, to be his second-term chief of staff, or that he promoted Gina McCarthy, who oversaw the rewriting of EPA regulations in his first term, to run the department. Democratic Senators are vowing to block any House Republican attempt to handcuff the EPA. Working in Obama’s favor is the fact that Americans, while disturbingly blasé about climate change, favor federal regulation of greenhouse gases by huge majorities.

Lashof predicted the following sequence of events. The agency will finish drafting its regulation scheme by the end of the year. It will then take about a year of public comments and revisions, at which point it will finalize its rule. That will be the end of 2014, just after the midterm elections. Another nine months to a year will be required to carry out the rule, which will get us to the end of 2015—and the international climate summit.

thanks for posting that! i meant to post it the other day, along with some of the discussion that chait's article generated.

grist's david roberts mostly agrees:

What I think has my friends upset, and where they differ, is Chait’s overall assessment: that Obama is therefore “the environmental president.” The question here is — as it is for every historical figure, but especially Obama, and especially on climate — compared to what?

Is Obama a success on climate compared to what needs to be done? Ha ha. No. Of course not. But then all world leaders fail that test. Chait says 17 percent carbon reductions by 2020 is greens’ “holy grail,” but it’s more like a moldy grail. We now know that much more is needed. For the U.S. to truly do its part, to achieve carbon zero by 2040 or so, would require massive systems change, an all-hands-on-deck wartime mobilization. Obama is not delivering that, or anything close, nor could he.

...The question for me is whether Obama has been a success compared to what was (and is) possible. And here, I’m with Chait: If he delivers ambitious regulations on existing power plants, then yes, Obama will be an overall success on climate and energy, even if he approves Keystone. Given the situation he inherited — a vertiginous economic crisis followed by persistent high unemployment, a Republican Party now single-mindedly devoted to nihilistic opposition, and a series of choke points like the filibuster that give a committed congressional opposition almost total veto power — he has accomplished a miraculous amount. (Remember universal health care? That was cool.)

joe romm does not:

The entire premise of Chait’s piece is that the failure to pass a climate bill isn’t fatal to Obama’s legacy because, near the end of his 8-year presidency, Obama is going to embrace tough carbon pollution standards for existing power plants along the lines of what the Natural Resources Defense Council has proposed (see here). Modified rapture!

Now I don’t think one can discount the fact that using the EPA to deal with carbon opens the door to significant delay through the courts. Worse, if the Republicans can ever figure out how to win the presidency again, they could slow, stop, or roll back the whole thing.

And why wouldn’t the GOP? Team Obama’s catastrophic climate silence — a silence his White House inanely imposed on much of the progressive and environmental establishment back in 2009 (see here) — coupled with his utter failure to push hard for a Senate vote, has turned a winning political “wedge” issue into something that is mistakenly perceived to be a political loser by much of the political establishment. His embrace of an “all of the above” energy strategy, which is to say no strategy at all, has legitimized a massive expansion of fossil fuel production — and export.

of course i'm glad that apparently the administration is planning on pushing new rules through EPA. but hearing the words "the environmental president" tossed around with respect to obama leaves a really sour taste. no sense in repeating the complaints for the millionth time. the environmental accomplishments that he has overseen have been great - improved MPG standards, the clean energy stuff in the stimulus, regulations on new power plants. but he still plays politics with the atmosphere (apparently not realizing that it's not an option), he still pukes up Frank Luntz-friendly "all of the above" rhetoric, he still refuses to say "climate change". we just passed 400 ppm. the 450 ppm limit that's often referenced as the scientific community's consensus figure of what is reasonably "safe" is out of date. that was the number that was being used back in IPCC 2007 days, but anyone that has even cursorily followed climate science over the last few years knows that 450 ppm is far too conservative.

and then there's the real possibility new EPA rules on existing power plants could be rolled back. the actions that the Obama administration now appear to be taking with respect to new regulation on existing power plants could have been put in place back in 2009. back then, in the golden days of the cap-and-trade legislation, the main argument against relying on EPA regulation to tackle climate change was the regulation could be rolled back if/when a republican president came into power. if they would have put them into place back then, in the early years of the obama presidency, at least there would have 7-8 years for the rule to play out. as usual, industry would have screamed that new rules would be the downfall of america and trigger the apocalypse, but the actual compliance to the requirements would cost a fraction of what they claim (as commonly happens with env. regulations, e.g., the acid rain program's regulation on NO2 and SOx in the early 1990s). but now, the rule would go out in the final year or two of the obama years (if we're lucky), and a new republican president could simply roll them back as soon as they install their stooges in the proper positions, before there's a chance for the rule to prove that it can implemented without armageddon.

also, the inevitable suing by industry and delays and appeals etc etc.

anyway, given that there's pretty much no possibility of carbon legislation right now (even though you'd think a carbon tax would be part of the discussion on a "grand bargain" on taxes/deficit/etc) , obv. regulation is the way to go. i'm just pissed they didn't do it earlier.

Twenty years of corporate-funded climate change denial in a country deeply wedded to cheap energy has pretty much poisoned the well for a political solution in the USA.

but anyone that has even cursorily followed climate science over the last few years knows that 450 ppm is far too conservative.

rereading that, i realize that it could be confusing on several different levels (not least of which is that politically, "conservative" in the U.S. means anti-climate change).

i just meant that it seems clear that 450 ppm is not a "safe level". hell, it's likely that even 400 ppm is not a safe level!

fucking terrifying indeed:

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_23510002/town-south-fork-ordered-evacuate-because-wildfire

this fire is burning all the way to treeline, from what i can tell. i've seen a lot of fires here in colorado, but they've all been foothills, maaaybe some montane zone stuff. this is subalpine/alpine shit. i wasn't even sure that was possible. anyway you can go to some places and see beetle-kill to the horizon practically. if it all burns, i can't even.

Creative destruction? The problem with many fires in modern western US forests is that they burn so much hotter than fires did a century ago. A fire so hot that it burns down to mineral soil takes ages to reseed and regrow anything but some very nasty stuff.

My cousin just lost his house in the Black Forest fire in Colorado Springs. His wife was interviewed in the Denver Post http://blogs.denverpost.com/food/2013/06/18/black-forest-fire-benefits/20160/

Some of these areas that are burning now haven't had a burn in recent memory.

http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/data/imagery/2013172/co-000/crefl2_A2013172193628-2013172194717_250m_co-000_143.jpg
Actual image much larger.

By the way, while current southern Rocky drought is severe, it will probably get worse.

According to this paper, by the 2050s, suitable habitats for all Rocky mountain tree species will move north by 600 km or up in elevation by 250 m. Ie, start planting trees from Albuquerque around Ft. Collins, and trees from Flagstaff around St. Lake City, now.

South America will probably have a bad fire season as well.

President Obama will announce Tuesday in a speech at Georgetown University that he plans to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants, according to individuals who have been briefed on the plan but asked not to be identified.

In a statement Saturday afternoon sent via the White House Twitter feed, Obama said that he plans to fulfill the pledge he made in his second inaugural address to “respond to the growing threat of climate change for the sake of our children and future generations.”

the accompanying video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcL3_zzgWeU

The full transcript of his remarks in the video:

In my inaugural address, I pledged that America would respond to the growing threat of climate change for the sake of our children and future generations.
This Tuesday, I’ll lay out my vision for where I believe we need to go –- a national plan to reduce carbon pollution, prepare our country for the impacts of climate change, and lead global efforts to fight it.
This is a serious challenge – but it’s one uniquely suited to America’s strengths.
We’ll need scientists to design new fuels, and farmers to grow them.
We’ll need engineers to devise new sources of energy, and businesses to make and sell them.
We’ll need workers to build the foundation for a clean energy economy.
And we’ll need all of us, as citizens, to do our part to preserve God’s creation for future generations – our forests and waterways, our croplands and snowcapped peaks.
There’s no single step that can reverse the effects of climate change. But when it comes to the world we leave our children, we owe it to them to do what we can.
So I hope you’ll share this message with your friends. Because this a challenge that affects everyone – and we all have a stake in solving it together.
I hope to see you Tuesday. Thank you.

i'd excited about the prospect of finally pushing the new rule on regulating new power plants, not to mention the (far more important) rule on existing power plants. the supreme court ordered EPA to do this SIX YEARS AGO, so it's about time.

less excited about hearing about how great nuclear power and natural gas are, and reaaaaaaally hoping the word "corn" is not used in the biofuels section.

Did anybody see the "Miami is doomed" story by Jeff Goddell in the new Rolling Stone?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-the-city-of-miami-is-doomed-to-drown-20130620

It was 85 F at 9am in northeast OH this morning. Last week it was cold enough at 6am for me to wear a jacket when biking to work. Just the normal ebb and flow nbd.

like ... no keystone?

don't think he's going to mention keystone today.

for those interested in watching, there's a livestream here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/live

supposed to start at 1:55 Eastern, I think.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/obama-keystone_n_3497292.html?1372180768

oh, nice! i hadn't seen that! and that article mentions that he's going to mention it in his speech, too.

Z S - "wrong about everything for over 30 years"

cautiously optimistic about this, altho really there's only so much he can do via executive order absent legislation from congress. EPA def needs to impose those rules on power plants tho, that's a big step.

reportedly he's still going to talk about clean coal and natural gas, so that sucks. but not unexpected.

EPA def needs to impose those rules on power plants tho, that's a big step.

totally, i just don't understand why it's taking a memo from the POTUS to do this? the supreme court already ordered EPA to do this in 2007!

clean coal is such a joke

I love how these kinds of speeches never, ever, ever, start on time