Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.