Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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