Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Picture-44-300x172.png

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