Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

^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.

all my possible plots on climate change are dystopias and star sweaty shirtless men with ammunition draped across both shoulders

One problem for capitalism in any lingering disaster scenario is that nearly all money is someone's liability, and the interest on that debt is only repayable in a growing economy. But the last four years have demonstrated that capitalists (ie, banks, institutional investors, and yes private savers) are willing to accept negative real yields from governments when scared shitless, so I'm pretty dubious about Chris Martenson-esque crash courses re: peak climate/peak oil and the collapse of money systems.

zs your giant post made me feel worse about this subject which is a pretty significant achievement at this point

Then again, I've no idea what Lee means by "capitalism". If s/he means global mega-corporations, all of them will have serious issues with supply chains. But captitalism meaning "directing investment from savers to prospective enterprises through financial intermediaries?" That's been going on 4000 years and I don't see any reason it wouldn't be viable even if there were a few million of us huddling around the Arctic ocean. Even small farming towns have banks.

xpost hahaha, sorry! but now, when the IPCC5 report comes out in 2014 and it's dire, you'll be able to depress your friends by saying "actually, since the report doesn't even include the permafrost carbon feedback it almost certainly underestimates the impacts of climate change"

people loooooove to hang out with climate realists

You know, I don't mind IPCC not modeling things they don't really know (at the moment) how to model. Some similar issues include Amazon drought & forest fire, or even phytoplankton biomass in more acidic oceans. As far as I'm aware, neither lend themselves (at the moment) to analytic modeling, unlike other positive feedbacks (CO2 solubility in warming seawater).

But ought to disclose the omission(s), and the likely impact of unmodelled positive feedbacks on outcomes, in bold print, on the first page of the report summary.

The destruction of the environment must be embraced in order for homo sapiens to evolve.

Let the oceans dry out and the koalas burn. Humans were not meant to be beings of flesh but gods of steel, plastic and silicon.

plastic? we'll need more petrochemicals for that

We grant an exception for organic matter that has been dead for millennia.

somehow i missed the recent guardian that revealed that obama's decision to not talk about climate change can actually be traced back to a meeting in March 2009.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/nov/01/obama-strategy-silence-climate-change

Think I'll hold off reading that for a while.

By capitalism, I should've said consumption- and/or growth-based economic systems, but mostly the latter. When so much of our economy is centered around the idea of continual growth, which of course requires resource consumption...

hey guys I know global warming & climate change is mega depressing but try reading this it'll make you feel better

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

Banaka otm. Let the koalas burn.

wow, 乒乓 otm

http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/b/4/5/b454ac1f2f8bd9c458b46bcbaebb9bd5.png Scale of an estimated Poincaré recurrence time for the quantum state of a hypothetical box containing a black hole with the estimated mass of the entire Universe, observable or not, assuming Linde's chaotic inflationary model with an inflaton whose mass is 10−6 Planck masses.

^really puts things into perspective

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip

In their scenario for = −1.5, the galaxies would first be separated from each other. About 60 million years before the end, gravity would be too weak to hold the Milky Way and other individual galaxies together. Approximately three months before the end, the solar system (or systems similar to our own at this time, as the fate of our own solar system 7.5 billion years in the future is questionable) would be gravitationally unbound. In the last minutes, stars and planets would be torn apart, and an instant before the end, atoms would be destroyed.[1]

http://i.imgur.com/mr0Kn.png

rip gr80

Nah, shield volcanos over hotpots have pretty mild eruptions. The earth drools basalt rather placidly compared to the explosive vomiting of melted crust from stratovolcanos at continental margins.

xp Big_Rip:

What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!

wow that is the best wikipedia article i have maybe ever seen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

so, putting together a couple of entries on this timeline:

the "arecibo message" was transmitted into space in 1974. if it's received and a reply is sent by the same method, by the time it arrives, the niagara falls will no longer exist, having eroded away to nothing

~stares into space for several minutes~