Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.

i hate obama's record on the environment as much as anyone (it especially sucked this last year in dc as half my friends went out and stanned for him across the country) but if he's beginning to turn the corner (more accurately if for some reason he thought that it was a good option to wait to turn the corner) i'm going to do everything i can to try to support it

otm. The past is past. We can't do anything about it. If we can make things happen that need to happen, it takes precedence over what's already done and over with.

I voted for Obama this year primarily to keep Mitt out of office, but the only joy I felt in my heart about it was out of an insane hope against hope that he'd get more radical in his second term, specifically with regard to the environment.

insane indeed

"radical" got a chuckle outta me

shove it, pinko.

if climate change were first and foremost framed as a security issue (which it is)

Do you mean beyond the usual drought leads to conflict equation? Or something along the lines of, " Nature: Nature's greatest terrorist!"?

"Mt Saint Helens was an inside job!"

it does mean changing the entire economy, so with a third of the country certifiably nuts, good luck.

mean getting people to realize that inaction right now > millions of deaths

embarrassingly i was sorta wasted at 10pm on a wednesday when i wrote that, so it's probably not clear that the ">" meant "will lead to", not "is greater than".

White House spokesman Jay Carney Jan. 23 deflated environmentalists’ hope of a major federal program to counter climate change, by declaring that the “we have no intention of proposing a carbon tax.”
Carney’s statement is a letdown for progressive climate-control advocates, who say the federal government has the regulatory and taxing power to try to affect the globe’s temperature by curbing the release of carbon dioxide from cars, houses, factories, power plants….

“I think the President has long supported congressional action on climate change,” Carney said Jan. 22. But “he looks at [climate control] in a more holistic way, and he will move forward in implementing some of the [regulatory and spending] actions that he took in the first term,” he said.

well, didn't take long to bust the bubble on that one.

“Obama made a point of highlighting how much emphasis he gave the issue after Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) thanked him afterward for mentioning climate change.

“‘I didn’t just mention it, I talked about it,’ Obama parried, according to Waxman.”

WAY TO GO!

he's great at talking about shit. see, this way we can all feel like we're president when we talk about it.

"You realize that you shouldn't have to be thanked for talking about an issue that directly threatens the lives of everyone living for the next thousand years, correct?", Waxman reportedly countered.

"I didn't shit my pants this week - how about THAT?!", Obama responded.

I feel like this was written by someone in this thread.

i quite like richard muller on climate change, his BEST project is a nice resource

http://berkeleyearth.org/

and there's loads of stuff on youtube where he explains things very simply so idiots like me can understand

lots of interesting things discussed here too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOfsSYsvQnI

It's nice that Richard Muller apparently had a come to jesus moment. A few years ago he was chiefly known as a climate change skeptic. In fact, when his BEST project showed that climate change was real and overwhelmingly caused by human beings - to the surprise of no one except for the Koch Brothers, who were the single largest funders of the project - he even published an op-ed in the NYT called The Conversion of a Climate Change Skeptic.

In that same op-ed, he also attacks a bunch of strawmen and tosses out a bunch of red herrings. e.g., "Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming." - yeah, no kdding! No single storm can be attributed to global warming. That's why no one who knows what they're talking about says that. He also refers to the possibility that global temperatures were higher during the "medieval warm period", which is a common skeptic argument that 1)isn't true) and 2)wouldn't even matter if it was true, because while of course the earth has warmed in the past for "natural" reasons, the crisis of climate change today is that it's happening so quickly and that humans are clearly causing it rather than natural forces. it's kind of like as if you accidentally started a fire that was quickly spreading, and a friend walks by and says "it's ok! last summer it was 106 degrees!" well...yeah...

anyway, sorry to trash muller, and i'm not trying to squash discussion! i'm just still a little..."skeptical" of his motives. *rim shot*

Ah, that's interesting. No, trash away, I really enjoy his lectures/books so I prob give what he says too much credibility. I didn't ever get the impression that he was a full-on sceptic. He just seemed rigorously scientific in his approach. And if you watch his lectures his line is "as a scientist I really don't know" but there are always asides: "but if I was a betting man...”, “it’s obvious much change can be attributed to humans, we need to understand how, and how much…” etc.

I think this attitude can be helpful, the better we understand the causes of CC the better equipped we’ll be to focus our energies on trying to prevent/reverse the damage done. I know the flipside, if you’re a well known scientist, is that you have to be very careful with what you say and how you say it. There’s a great bit in one of his lectures where he admits how bad he (or scientists are in general) are at that.

That sceptical science website looks great btw. Cheers.

handy thing to keep in mind every time some blowhard starts talking about how addressing climate change would damage the economy: in 2011-12 alone, the economic damage from extreme weather events in the US was 188 BILLION DOLLARS

http://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ExtremeWeather_table2_021113-1.png

"we can't bring in a fire truck to put out a fire in the apartment complex; bringing in the fire department would cost over $5,000!"

and yes, i realize some of those are tornadoes. but the biggest, highest costing extreme weather events are the 2012 drought/heat wave ($78 billion), hurricane sandy ($30 billion) and the 2011 drought/heat wave ($12 billion). that's $120 billion of the damage, right there.

and yes, i realize that not every drought and hurricane can or should be blamed on climate change. but climate change increases the frequency of these events, and makes once-rare super-events much more likely. it's like rolling two dice. climate change modifies the dice so that they go up to 7 instead of just 6. rolling a 13 or a 14 becomes a legitimate possibility, and 11s and 12s, which were once very rare, now become more common.

sigh. no one's going to do anything.

maybe insurance companies will step up to the plate and force policy change.

Obama did some of his toughest talking yet re:climate last night during SOTU. Not holding my breath for him to follow through, but you never know.

The right people are crying, at least

ewwww....why does the christian science monitor have "featured content" directly from the coal lobby? seriously, i mistakenly thought that they were a respected source of journalism! i realize that every newspaper is in deep shit right now, but "featuring" content straight from industry groups seems to break at least 3000 different journalistic codes simultaneously!

they want to provide insights on the future of fuel and power, ZS

At least Boxer and Sanders are trying toraise the issue.

It's James Hansen's tax and dividend scheme. I think it would be more politically palatable if instead of a per-capita dividend the bill just incrementally decreased the payroll tax (both employee and employer shares) - same general effect, except for the unemployed/retired, more closely matches the consumer burden of an increased carbon tax, and gets employers (and hopefully science literate Republicans) on board. Toss in a retiree heating oil subsidy if you're worried about Granny freezing.

great timing

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/a-blogs-adieu/

yep. it's the result of the NYT's announcement in January that it was disbanding it's environment desk. took a few months, but here we are. it's ok, though, fox news will continue covering the environment.

1) White House officials have indicated that Obama will approve Keystone XL. here's the line of reasoning:

The official dismissed environmental groups’ contention that building the pipeline would open up vast deposits of the Alberta tar sands, and so increase the emissions that cause climate change. “There have been thousands of miles of pipelines that have been built while President Obama has been in office, and I think the point is, is that it hasn’t necessarily had a significant impact one way or the other on addressing climate change,” the official said.

wow.

2) the long-awaited proposed rule from EPA to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants is going to be delayed. there's some concern that the proposal, as it was written, was not going to be defensible during the inevitable lawsuits. also obama and his administration doesn't really care about climate change. so it's a combo. shit sandwich on rye.

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Carbon-Final.jpg

Lovely news to wake up to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7Y8w1BOFnI

gotta love the guy at 0:30 and 1:00 in who argues

i read that X is not happening. in order to solve X, we need to rely on market solutions.

listen people, global warming is NOT HAPPENING. but if we're going to solve it, you bet your ass it would be best to let industry develop technology to get us out of this mess!

2:04 in, same thing

"i definitely think there's a free market solution that won't require any government intervention to solve this"

ok great i'm all ears lay it on me

this is a pretty sweet graphic imo:

http://infobeautiful3.s3.amazonaws.com/2013/01/1276_gigatons_CO2.png

(open it in a new tab if it's too small for you)

Still small. :\

Link to the original?

Also, wtf, guy at 2:55 is all, climate change is real, we should do something about it???