Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.