Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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~

... space stares back.

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).

finally got around to it:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/0f11c28322e21e504a84557d1b94850e/tumblr_merzd5aB6n1qdmmiqo1_500.gif

that is awesomely clear and terrifying

Wow ZS. Can we share this around?

of course! just make sure to include the link to the article: http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/article/2012/arctic-sea-ice-getting-thinner-younger

xp flopson:

You might also enjoy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/world/asia/record-heat-fuels-widespread-fires-in-australia.html

Four months of record-breaking temperatures stretching back to September 2012 have produced what the government says are “catastrophic” fire conditions along the eastern and southeastern coasts of the country, where the majority of Australians live.

Data analyzed on Wednesday by the government Bureau of Meteorology indicated that national heat records had again been set. The average temperature across the country on Tuesday was the highest since statistics began being kept in 1911, at 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit), exceeding a mark set only the day before. Meteorologists have had to add two new color bands to their forecast maps, extending their range up to 129° Fahrenheit.

“Those of us who spend our days trawling — and contributing to — the scientific literature on climate change are becoming increasingly gloomy about the future of human civilization,” Elizabeth Hanna, a researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra, told The Sydney Morning Herald. “We are well past the time of niceties, of avoiding the dire nature of what is unfolding, and politely trying not to scare the public.”

I was just down there, more or less, last week, on a farm near Ulladulla, where there were a lot of trees and other bits of the bush still charred from fires back in ... 2001, maybe? So weird that the time we spent in NSW was unseasonably cool, followed by a radical shift this severe. Very scary.

Meanwhile, here in Chicago it is in the low 50s. In January. Taken as a whole, with that report calling 2012 the warmest US on record, and I'm pretty scared shitless.

it's supposed to be 60 in NJ over the weekend. one day i'll have to teach my future children how the seasons used to be. "winter was cold ... all the time. and there was a season called spring that started cool and slowly got warmer..."

Honestly, I was thinking about that in the car an hour ago. "When I was younger, we had trees, and grass was green, and you could drink the water, and the world was not always on fire ..."

The last time that there was a month with a below average global temperature was February 1985, when I was 1 1/2 years old.

320 days in Chicago with less than an inch of snow. Record.

Water level of Lake Michigan supposedly way down. Obviously the Mississippi is a wreck right now for the same reason.

What happens after 100 years and +5 degrees celsius? Does it stop, or does it keep just getting hotter and hotter until in 700 years we're baked off the planet?

It was 108 degrees in Sydney yesterday!

Apparently.

so hot australia had to add two new colors to its forecast map