Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.

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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.

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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 ?