Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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

http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2013/01/australia-wildfires

they are visible from space

http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2013/01/01fotos/Australia-fires-600.jpg/image_large

Doing presentation training at work, going to talk about CC to my materialist coworkers. My original topic was going to be what owning a dog can teach humans.

oh man, good luck!

i wonder what dogs could teach us about climate change?

don't shit in yr own bed i guess

or find someone to walk around behind you with a plastic bag so you never have to deal with that shit

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/01/world_population_may_actually_start_declining_not_exploding.html

i read that the other day (yesterday?) when you posted it, and although it would be great news if population would "naturally" stabilize (rather than being forced down by widespread famine/diseases) sooner rather than later, and even decline a little, the article does nothing to convince me that it will. plus, i find it really hard to take paragraphs like this seriously:

That might sound like an outrageous claim, but it comes down to simple math. According to a 2008 IIASA report, if the world stabilizes at a total fertility rate of 1.5—where Europe is today—then by 2200 the global population will fall to half of what it is today. By 2300, it’ll barely scratch 1 billion. (The authors of the report tell me that in the years since the initial publication, some details have changed—Europe’s population is falling faster than was previously anticipated, while Africa’s birthrate is declining more slowly—but the overall outlook is the same.) Extend the trend line, and within a few dozen generations you’re talking about a global population small enough to fit in a nursing home.

They hold up Germany as the OMG what if everyone's birth rate falls this low? example. OK, worst-case-scenarios are how journalism works* - but there's no argument offered as to why Germany should provide the model.

It is interesting that they don't mention the situation in the UK, which is that fertility rates have been rising year-on-year since 2001 and are now nearing 2. That increase in fertility is mainly accounted for by white britishers, not immigrant populations.

The author also disregards the fact that death rates are still falling. Annual births still exceed deaths in the UK, so the population would be increasing even without immigration.

*Personally think this is a p. cool scenario

Predicting future birth rates is a bit of a mug's game

xp Bnad:

Given the ultimate atmospheric carbon load the Earth system approaches a new equilibrium between solar radiation and the amount reradiated. Assuming radiative forcing stabilizes at 2100 levels, a further 0.5 °C mean temperature increase is expected by 2200 as the deep oceans warm up to equilibrium. Here's a longer term chart of climate models from IPCC 2007:

http://clivebest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/figure-ts-32-l.png

But there's a lot of carbon in natural reservoirs, like drying/burning equatorial rainforests, melting/decaying permafrost (worth maybe 1 °C) and destabilizing seabed methane clathrates (I've seen no good estimates here, because but the clathrates vary so widely in depth/vulnerability, but the total amount (2,000 ~ 10,000 Gt) is multiples larger than current atmospheric carbon). These tipping point effects are not modeled in the current or planned IPCC scenarios, likely due to high uncertainty in the amounts and pace of those natural releases.

During the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago, 2500-6800 Gt of carbon were released over a few thousand years, resulting in a 6 °C rise that gradually subsided over the ensuing 200,000 years. The large PETM δ13C excursion seen in seabed cores suggests that runaway greenhouse emissions of biogenic methane clathrates was responsible. Using this as a model, we won't become Venus (not in this billion years), as the vast majority of terrestrial carbon is locked way in crustal carbonite rock, but we're making decisions this generation that will effect the next thousand generations.

^ ...were responsible...affect the next 1000 generations... Want a post editor here...

At this rate, 2200 seems an awful long way away. I'm pretty worried about 2013 or 2014.

Gave my presentation, muffed a point about economy and adaptation costs I wanted to make to the debt hawks in the crowd, and the one question I got was, "So... you're a member of that... EPA, huh?"

haha, i've been there

in that situation, i mean

Snowed in the middle east. Israel, Saudi Arabia ...

Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1754/20122845.full

Indeed, if humanity is very unlucky with the climate, there may be reductions in yields of major crops [45], although near-term this may be unlikely to affect harvests globally [46].

Feels like this is inevitable, actually, but I can't back that feeling up right now.

even without climate change, future crop yields are uncertain anyway. annual growth in crop yields after the agricultural green revolution has been declining for years, and it's fully stagnated or worse in many areas (from the abstract of a Nature article published a few weeks ago: "Although yields continue to increase in many areas, we find that across 24–39% of maize-, rice-, wheat- and soybean-growing areas, yields either never improve, stagnate or collapse." maintaining continued growth (to meet population growth) is already turning into a battle between monsanto and their industrial budz vs a declining stock of land resources, both in terms of quantity and quality. we deplete our topsoil at a rate that is 10 to 40 times faster than it's ability to regenerate itself (100-400 years per cm). and about 40% of the soil that we do use is classified as either degraded or seriously degraded.

all of that's before you consider climate change.

I hadn't seen this before layed out so plainly before, but Gwynne Dyer corresponds with the leading lights of the field, so I don't doubt it:

The rule of thumb is that we lose ten per cent of global food production for every rise in average global temperature of one degree C.

So, if we're on a path to 9 billion and a 3 °C, we just need to collectively decide which third of our descendands will starve.

NYT Dismantles its Environment Desk

The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. No decision has been made about the fate of the Green Blog, which is edited from the environment desk.

it's with a heavy heart, but we need more reporters on the rooftop beehive beat.

Here's a relevant quote from an article published just a week ago:

“I ask myself, ‘In 20 years, what will we be proudest that we addressed, and where will we scratch our head and say why didn’t we focus more on that?’” said Glenn Kramon, assistant managing editor of the New York Times.

The Times published the most stories on climate change and had the biggest increase in coverage among the five largest U.S. daily papers, according to media trackers at the University of Colorado.

“Climate change is one of the few subjects so important that we need to be oblivious to cycles and just cover it as hard as we can all the time,” Kramon said….

Kramon, the Times‘ assistant managing editor, attributed last year’s uptick in the paper’s coverage to the fruition of a 4-year-old effort to group top reporters on a separate environment desk.

http://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2012/01/media_coverage_climate_change.jpeg.492x0_q85_crop-smart.jpg

i'm pretty sure we're fucked on climate change. that's my latest thing to come to terms with, along with turning 30 and my inevitable demise.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/at-a-protest-science-and-religion-team-up/

this gives me some hope at least

so, two different national environmental "conversations" happening this week.

1) the first and less prominent topic was the release of a lengthy report from Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol that analyzed the demise of the big cap-and-trade bill in 2010. apologies for linking to a bunch of grist articles, but they had great coverage of this, including a summary of the report which will probably be much more widely read than the analysis itself, which is 100+ pages. Skocpol lays much of the blame on environmental organizations for failing to build enough grassroots support and for failing to adequately respond to the infamous Coalition of Idiotic Uncles (aka the tea party) that vomited all over actual discussions of climate and health care policy at the time.

on that area (the tea party's impact on the demise of the bill), Skocpol's analysis is great. it's an aspect that hasn't really been studied enough, at least not that i've seen. but many people took issue with her laying the blame at the feet of environmental organizations while mostly excluding all of the other malevolent factors: big oil, disinformation campaigns, terrible media coverage.

grist's David Roberts devoted 3 articles to the topic that are worth reading:

http://grist.org/climate-energy/what-theda-skocpol-gets-right-about-the-cap-and-trade-fight/
http://grist.org/politics/the-road-forward-from-cap-and-trade/
http://grist.org/politics/if-you-want-to-pass-climate-legislation-fix-u-s-politics/

eric pooley, who wrote the excellent book The Climate War, also weighed in: http://grist.org/climate-energy/why-the-climate-bill-failed-its-not-that-simple/

2) then there was the surprise emphasis on climate change in the inaugural speech:

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.

The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

there's a lot to say about that, and god i hope he's actually willing to talk about climate change for the next 4 years for a change. the emphasis that he placed on it prompted a lot of coverage/speculation, much of which assumes that any action on climate change will and must come from EPA, because congress is a lost cause. that's probably correct, i guess. in any case, it's a fucking shame that it's apparently not realistic to consider legislative action, especially given the context of the focus on debt and the deficit. a carbon tax could be implemented that channels some of the money back to people (to reduce the burden of the tax on lower-income people), some of the money to the federal coffers to address the needs of deficit pantshitters, and some of the money toward clean energy R&D and deployment.

anyway, in response to the inauguration speech, joe romm mentioned something that will provide an early tell into whether or not obama is going to attempt to compromise with the atmosphere or if he's actually going to take a stand: "We will soon see if these words have any meaning whatsoever — since approving the Keystone XL pipeline would utterly vitiate them."

YES

http://content.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2013/01/sierra-club-engage-civil-disobedience-first-time-organizations-history

The Sierra Club Board of Directors has approved the one-time use of civil disobedience for the first time in the organization’s 120-year history.

Recognizing the imminent danger posed by climate disruption, including record heat waves, drought, wildfires and the devastation of superstorm Sandy, the Sierra Club board of directors has suspended a long-standing Club policy to allow, for one time, the organization to lead a group of environmental activists, civil rights leaders, visionaries, scientists, and other high-profile individuals in a peaceful protest to dirty and dangerous tar sands. The action will be by invitation only and is being co-sponsored by 350.org.

i only wish that it was open to everyone (not just high-profile people).

second guessing myself here, as usual.

just now i was reading joe romm's take that the odds are that the keystone xl pipeline won't be approved, largely because john kerry will be the one making the decision at state, and he seems to get it. last summer he described a "conspiracy of silence" about climate change in congress: "It is a conspiracy that has not just stalled, but demonized any constructive effort to put America in a position to lead the world on this issue….
Climate change is one of two or three of the most serious threats our country now faces, if not the most serious, and the silence that has enveloped a once robust debate is staggering for its irresponsibility….
I hope we confront the conspiracy of silence head-on and allow complacence to yield to common sense, and narrow interests to bend to the common good. Future generations are counting on us."

anyway, all of that got me thinking about how different things would be if climate change were first and foremost framed as a security issue (which it is) - how many more people that would reach, how it could help to build support for it across coalitions...

which in turn made made me briefly imagine how the best case scenarios, if climate change were successfully mitigated or adapted to, would differ so widely according to the prevailing discourse that helped to save the day. if it was a security discourse, it would bring the defense industry into the equation, with all of the $ and influence that entails, but it seems like the emphasis would be on technology, defense, and adaptation - strengthening the literal physical defenses around the united states, focusing on adaptation rather than mitigation, aggressively wrapping up resources. whereas a successful moral appeal to people's better nature (almost certainly the wrong term, but i mean getting people to realize that inaction right now > millions of deaths) might put more emphasis on mitigation and conservation and place more of a burden on restraining people's habits rather than coming up with a technology to save the day. and a third, technocentric/risk management paradigm might frame the threat of climate change in more pragmatic terms and focus on energy efficiency.

fwiw though it seems like the military/security discourse option is most likely. there's too much confluence there of influence, $, a top stakeholder position on the issue and a set of industry stakeholders that would profit.

whereas most people don't care about people dying if it's more than 100 feet away or more than a year in the future. people care, but not enough to do anything.
and the public policy dream of people actually giving a shit about efficiency and models on a widespread scale is fun to think about but it seems like in real life life people are not often swayed by logic

last post on this thread for at least a month because i'm probably a post away from being permabanned

Stop 25.3 million tons carbon/year from Keystone XL, which will just be burned by China instead, while leasing 272 million tons of Federal land ooal mining rights every year of the first Administration, some to be exported to China as well. Its showboating.